Radeon HD 6850 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 speed at 2200 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a speed of 2250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 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 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6500 XT should be 15% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be quite a bit (approximately 278%) better at texture filtering 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 will be a lot (about 184%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.