GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce RTX 3060

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce RTX 3060, which makes use of a 8 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1320 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a frequency of 1875 MHz on this card. It features 3584 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce RTX 3060 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144640 (65%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 will be a lot (about 35%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38640 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be just a bit (more or less 6%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce RTX 3060, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (6%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is 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 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.