Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 6650 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 2055 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 2190 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 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 HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		287072 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 23072 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6650 XT should be quite a bit (approximately 122%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		263040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 144640 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 6650 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 6650 XT		131520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 101920 (344%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.