Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has a clock frequency of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2250 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and uses a 6 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 6500 XT will be 2% quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
	Difference: 3328 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be quite a bit (about 433%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 114400 (433%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be much (about 167%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (167%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.