Radeon RX 5500 vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (123%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6950 XT should be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT should be quite a bit (about 319%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 5500. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 469040 (319%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6950 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 192960 (361%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.