Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop is a mobile graphics card from the Blackwell family for laptops, which Team Green presented in April 2025 and became available in May. It is based on the GB206 chip and offers 3328 shader / CUDA cores, 104 tensor cores and 26 ray tracing units. The 8 GB GDDR7 graphics memory is connected via a 128-bit memory bus. Other features of the GPU include native PCIe 5 support, DisplayPort 2.1a, DirectX 12_2 Ultimate and support for DLSS4 and Reflex 2.

Performance

As always, the performance depends on the cooling and the maximum power consumption (TGP) of the RTX 5060 Laptop. In synthetic benchmarks, the new card is just ahead of the old RTX 4070 Laptop GPU in synthetic benchmarks. In our gaming tests, however, the mobile RTX 4070 is still slightly faster. As a result, the GPU is recommended for QHD gaming with maximum settings and DLSS or slightly reduced detail level in demanding games (such as F1 25).

Power consumption

The chip can be configured from 45 to 100 watts TGP and can be clocked differently accordingly. With 45 watts TGP, for example, the GP clocks from 952 - 1455 MHz, at the full 100 watts with 1950 - 2310 MHz.

The chip is produced in the 5nm process at TSMC (4N FinFET).

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.

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).