Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with GPU clock speed of 2200 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory set to run at 2250 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 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 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6500 XT, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 19456 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (about 170%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 88600 (170%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6500 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47200 (203%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's 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 ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.