Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 6650 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 2055 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a frequency of 2190 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		176 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6650 XT is 20% faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		287072 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 47072 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should be quite a bit (about 152%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		263040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 158544 (152%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT is a lot (approximately 341%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		131520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 101664 (341%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.