NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon 780M

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).

AMD Radeon 780M

The AMD Radeon 780M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 7040 series for laptops (Phoenix, e.g. Ryzen 9 7940HS). The iGPU is based on the new RDNA3 architecture and has 12 CUs (= 768 shaders) clocked at up to 3 GHz (depending on the CPU model). As the predecessor Radeon 680M, the 780M supports hardware raytracing, although the performance is too slow to use it in current games.

Thanks to the new architecture and higher clock speeds, the Radeon 780M should be clearly faster then the old Radeon 680M. This means most demanding games should be playable in minimum graphics settings (like Cyberpunk 2077) and less demanding games like Fifa 23 can be played in higher settings and resolutions (1080p). In early 2023, the Radeon 780M is the fastest iGPU on the market.

Thanks to the modern 4nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD). The whole chip of the first two models can be configured between 15 - 54 Watt TDP.