Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has clock 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 Texture Address Units 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 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 187 Watts (175%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 is 74% quicker than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
	Difference: 108544 (74%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 65%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91200 (65%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 32%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 6500 XT, and able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22400 (32%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 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 better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.