Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which features a core clock speed of 1925 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is made up of 5120 SPUs, 320 Texture Address Units, and 128 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (81%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6950 XT is 207% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		589824 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 397824 (207%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT will be a lot (approximately 594%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 527200 (594%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT is quite a bit (more or less 732%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (732%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.