GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2816 SPUs, 176 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 R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (76%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce RTX 3060 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon R9 290X in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48640 (15%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 is a small bit (more or less 5%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7040 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3060 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12160 (24%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.