AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is a mid range graphics card for desktop PCs. It is using the Navi 24 graphics chip which uses the RDNA 2 architecture and is manufactured in 6nm at TSMC. The 6500XT offers 16 compute units (CUs = 1,024 shaders) and 4 GB GDDR6 dedicated VRAM connected via a 64 Bit interface (143.9 GB/s max).

The performance of the Radeon RX 6500 XT is similar to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super, but slower than an older Radeon RX 5500 XT. Therefore, the card is best suited for 1080p and high presets of 2021 games (see below for actual game benchmarks).

The power consumption is rated at 107 Watt (TGP) and therefore similar to a GTX 1650 Super (100 Watt).

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).