Radeon RX 6500 XT vs Radeon RX 7900 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which features a core clock speed of 1500 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 2500 MHz. It also uses a 320-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 5 nm design. It is comprised of 5376 SPUs, 336 Texture Address Units, and 192 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon RX 7900 XT		300 Watts
	Difference: 193 Watts (180%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 7900 XT is 456% faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		819200 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 671744 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is a lot (about 258%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		504000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 363200 (258%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is quite a bit (more or less 309%) better at AA than the Radeon RX 6500 XT, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 7900 XT		288000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 217600 (309%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.