GeForce GTX 870M vs GeForce RTX 3060

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce RTX 3060, which comes with a clock frequency of 1320 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1875 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and makes use of a 8 nm design. It is made up of 3584 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce RTX 3060 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 870M in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 272640 (284%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 is a lot (about 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 870M. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42448 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3060 is superior to the GeForce GTX 870M, by far. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40776 (181%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 processed in a second.

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