Radeon RX 5500 XT vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which comes with a clock speed of 1925 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 5120 SPUs, 320 TAUs, and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 205 Watts (158%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6950 XT will be 157% quicker than the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		589824 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 360448 (157%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 308%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 5500 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 464904 (308%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6950 XT is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 191456 (348%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.