GeForce GTX 1080 vs GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1080 has a core clock speed of 1607 MHz and a GDDR5X memory frequency of 1251 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 16 nm design. It is made up of 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which comes with a clock speed of 1410 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 8 nm design. It features 4864 SPUs, 152 Texture Address Units, and 80 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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