Radeon HD 6850 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with a clock speed of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2250 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 6 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6500 XT, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19456 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 278%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103600 (278%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be a lot (more or less 184%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45600 (184%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.