AMD Radeon RX 6800S vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon RX 6300M

AMD Radeon RX 6800S

The AMD Radeon RX 6800S is a mobile high-end graphics card for gaming laptops. It uses the Navi 23 chip based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. It uses all 2,048 shaders (= 32 CUs), 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs and therefore is similar to the desktop Radeon RX 6700 XT. The 128 Bit memory system connects 8 GB GDDR6 with 2 GHz memory clock. Furthermore, the RX6800S includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. The RX 6800S is the power saving variant of the RX 6800M and features slower clock speeds and a lower TDP.

Due to the lower clock speed, the performance should be lower than the RX 6800M. AMD specified the performance between the low power variants of the RTX 3070 (80-100W) and RTX 3080 (80-100W, former Max-Q).

The Navi 22 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process. Thanks to the reduced TDP, the 6800S is suited for thin gaming laptops.

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 RX 6300M

The AMD Radeon RX 6300M is a mobile entry-level graphics card based on the Navi 24 chip (RDNA 2  architecture) manufactured in the modern 6nm process. It features 768 cores (12 CUs - compute units) and 2 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 128 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 8 MB Infinity Cache. The game clock speed is specified at 1512 MHz. The 6300M supports Smart Access Memory and SmartShift Technology.

The performance should be similar to a mobile GTX 1650 (according to AMD) and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming with medium settings.

The Navi 24 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 6nm process and should offer a good energy efficiency.