Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which uses a 6 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 2200 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2250 MHz on this specific 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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6500 XT should be 2% faster than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 3328 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (about 433%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 114400 (433%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be a lot (more or less 167%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (167%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.