NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 is a DirectX 11 high-end desktop graphics card. It is based on the GK104 chip and manufactured in 28 nm at TSMC. The core clock can be boosted up to 1058 MHz (from 1006 base clock) and the memory is clocked at 3004 MHz (GDDR5). The similar named mobile GeForce GTX 680M is also based on the GK104 chip, but offers only 1344 shader as the desktop GTX 670 and a low clock rate of 720 MHz.

Depending on game and settings, the performance of the GTX 680 is similar to a Radeon R9 280X. Therefore, even the fastest mobile GPUs like the GeForce GTX 780M are outperformed by more than 30 percent. Demanding games like Metro: Last Light can be played fluently in 1080p and maximum detail settings. In some cases, even higher resolutions or additional AA/AF are possible.

The power consumption of the GTX 680 desktop card is rated at 195 Watt TDP and therefore two 6-pin power connectors are needed to power the card.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a fast desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 12 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 192 Bit memory bus. It offers 3,584 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2070 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings (in 2021).

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3060 is specified at 170 Watt and therefore slightly higher than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).