Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which makes use of a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1925 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM is set to run at a speed of 2250 MHz on this model. It features 5120 SPUs along with 320 Texture Address Units and 128 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon RX 6950 XT		335 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (81%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 6950 XT will be 207% quicker than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		589824 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 397824 (207%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT will be a lot (more or less 594%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		616000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 527200 (594%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6950 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 732%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6950 XT		246400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 216800 (732%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.