AMD Radeon 660M vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

AMD Radeon 660M

The AMD Radeon 660M is an integrated GPU in the entry level Ryzen 6000 series for laptops (Rembrandt, e.g. Ryzen 5 6600U). The GPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture and has 6 of the 12 CUs (= 384 shaders) clocked at up to 1,900 MHz (depending on the CPU model). The 680M and 660M iGPUs are the first integrated graphics card with hardware raytracing support, although the performance is too slow to use it in current games.

Due to the halved CU count and lower core clock, the Radeon 660M is clearly slower than the Radeon 680M and most likely only on par with the old Radeon Vega 8 iGPUs. 

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 (depending on the CPU model).

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).