Radeon HD 7850 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which makes use of a 6 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 2200 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a frequency of 2250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (approximately 156%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 85760 (156%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (approximately 156%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7850, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42880 (156%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.