GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with GPU clock speed of 2200 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory running at 2250 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 76544 (52%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is much (approximately 29%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31600 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is just a bit (approximately 5%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 970, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (5%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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