Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which features core speeds of 2200 MHz on the GPU, and 2250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (64%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is quite a bit (about 76%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60800 (76%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should be much (approximately 120%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (120%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.