AMD Radeon 680M vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

AMD Radeon 680M

The AMD Radeon 680M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 6000 series for laptops (Rembrandt, e.g. Ryzen 9 6980HX). The iGPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture and has 12 CUs (= 768 shaders) clocked at up to 2,400 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.

Thanks to the new architecture, high core count and the increased maximum core clock, the Radeon 680M should be clearly faster then the old Radeon Vega 8 iGPUs. Therefore, the 680M should be the fastest integrated graphics card in early 2022. Compared to the dedicated Radeon 5300M (also RDNA), the 680M should still be significantly slower. According to AMD, the Radeon 680M (in the 6800U) is faster than a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX450 and best suited for 1080p gaming and low details (for AAA 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 (depending on the CPU model). The whole Ryzen 6000 chip can be configured down to 15W.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q

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).