GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 280, which comes with core speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (47%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce RTX 3060 should be 54% faster than the Radeon R9 280 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128640 (54%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 should be much (about 41%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43344 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 will be quite a bit (more or less 112%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33504 (112%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.