Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1968 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6600 XT, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will be a lot (about 141%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 147408 (141%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will be a lot (approximately 322%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 280, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 96096 (322%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.