GeForce GTX 870M vs GeForce RTX 3060

Intro

The GeForce GTX 870M makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 941 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce RTX 3060, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1320 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1875 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 8 nm design. It is made up of 3584 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.