Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6650 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 2055 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a speed of 2190 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		176 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6650 XT should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		287072 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 47072 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should be much (about 152%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		263040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 158544 (152%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6650 XT is superior to the Radeon R9 280, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		131520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 101664 (341%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.