Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6600 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which has GPU clock speed of 1968 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory set to run at 2000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is much (more or less 113%) better 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 running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6600 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

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

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