Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with a core clock frequency of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2250 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and uses a 6 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 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
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 44544 (30%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is much (approximately 59%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52000 (59%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40800 (138%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.