Radeon HD 3870 1GB vs Radeon RX 6900 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1825 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this card. It features 5120 SPUs as well as 320 Texture Address Units and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3870 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon RX 6900 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (183%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 6900 XT should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		524288 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 452288 (628%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is much (about 4610%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		584000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 571600 (4610%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6900 XT should be quite a bit (more or less 1784%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 3870 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6900 XT		233600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 1GB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 221200 (1784%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.