Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has core clock speeds of 2200 MHz on the GPU, and 2250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs along with 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 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 268 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 117% faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 172544 (117%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be just a bit (more or less 13%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (13%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 6990, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17280 (33%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.