Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6650 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which comes with core speeds of 2055 MHz on the GPU, and 2190 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 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 HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6650 XT should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		287072 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 23072 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should be much (about 122%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		263040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 144640 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6650 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		131520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 101920 (344%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.