GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

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

The GeForce RTX 3060 should in theory perform quite a bit 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 57%) better at 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 running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce RTX 3060, and very much so. (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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.