Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1968 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is 9% quicker than the Radeon R9 280 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22144 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be a lot (more or less 141%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 147408 (141%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6600 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 96096 (322%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. 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 memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.