Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which features core clock speeds of 1968 MHz on the GPU, and 2000 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		160 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 is 1% quicker than the Radeon RX 6600 XT in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6600 XT		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT should be quite a bit (more or less 113%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		251904 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 133504 (113%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6600 XT is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 6600 XT		125952 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 96352 (326%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 most pixels the video card could 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 Render Output Units by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.