GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (76%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce RTX 3060 should be 15% faster than the Radeon R9 290 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48640 (15%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 is a bit (more or less 16%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19840 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 should be much (more or less 24%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (24%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.