Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

The Radeon R9 280X uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which has clock speeds of 1968 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.