GeForce GTX 1080 vs GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1080 features a GPU clock speed of 1607 MHz, and the 8192 MB of GDDR5X RAM runs at 1251 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1410 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 8 nm design. It is comprised of 4864 SPUs, 152 TAUs, and 80 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus 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 memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.