GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also features 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 3060 is 15% faster than the Radeon R9 290X overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 will be a small bit (about 5%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7040 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3060 is superior to the Radeon R9 290X, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.