Radeon RX 6500 XT vs Radeon RX 7900 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which comes with 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

In theory, the Radeon RX 7900 XT will be 456% quicker than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (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 will be much (approximately 258%) more effective at texture 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

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 7900 XT is superior to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, by a large margin. (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 maximum 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 card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few 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.