Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 6950 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which features GPU clock speed of 1925 MHz, and 16384 MB of GDDR6 RAM running at 2250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 5120 Stream Processors, 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

The Radeon RX 6950 XT, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (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 should be quite a bit (approximately 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

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6950 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and very much so. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.