Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1968 MHz. The GDDR6 memory runs at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units 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 HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is quite a bit (more or less 113%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 133504 (113%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6600 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 96352 (326%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.