GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which has core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce RTX 3060 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 215040 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 should be much (more or less 85%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67840 (85%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 should be a lot (about 98%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (98%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.