Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has a core clock frequency of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2250 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit 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 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (76%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be a bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 107%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72800 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43200 (159%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.