GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3060		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 3060 is 44% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3060		368640 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112640 (44%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 57%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce RTX 3060. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce RTX 3060		147840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84160 (57%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 46%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce RTX 3060, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce RTX 3060		63360 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29440 (46%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.