GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

The GeForce RTX 3060 makes use of a 8 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1320 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a speed of 1875 MHz on this specific card. It features 3584 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.