NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs AMD Radeon 610M

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 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 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

AMD Radeon 610M

The AMD Radeon 610M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen and Athlon 7020 series for laptops (Mendocino, e.g. Ryzen 5 7520U). The GPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture and has only 2 CUs (= 128 shaders) clocked at up to 1,900 MHz (depending on the CPU model). The 610M supports 4 display outputs and AV1 video decoding in hardware.

Due to the low amount of shaders, the gaming performance is very low and only suited for low demanding 3D games.

Thanks to the modern 6nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics card can also be used for slim and light notebooks.