Radeon R9 285 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which makes use of a 6 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 2200 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a speed of 2250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 83 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 28544 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be much (more or less 37%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 285. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37984 (37%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be quite a bit (approximately 140%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 285, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41024 (140%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 are processed per second. This 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.