GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 3060 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112640 (44%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 57%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce RTX 3060. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84160 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce RTX 3060, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29440 (46%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.