GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Performance-wise, the GeForce RTX 3060 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3060 is a lot (about 85%) faster with regards to 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3060 is the winner, and very much so. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.