Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 2200 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 2250 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 6500 XT overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (about 65%) more effective at AF 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%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 6500 XT, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.