AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is a mid-range desktop GPU and is primarily designed for gaming in 1440p. This makes the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT the fourth-fastest model of the current Radeon generation and places it directly behind the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The graphics chip is manufactured using the 5 nm process at TSMC. The chiplet design is also used in the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, although there are only four MCDs here. Nevertheless, the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT has 16 GB of VRAM, beating the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 in terms of technical data.

Features

RDNA 3 continues to serve as the basis for the Navi 32 graphics chip. The already established features such as SAM (Smart Access Memory) and the Infinity Cache are also available in the new mid-range model aka Radeon RX 7800 XT. Compared to the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT the ray tracing part has been revised and AI support has been implemented on the hardware side. The media engine has been updated and videos can be decoded/encoded with a resolution of up to 8K. The modern DisplayPort connection is also available on the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, as version 2.1 is currently only available from AMD. AMD's answer to DLSS is FSR 2.0 and offers a significant increase in performance in games with the upscaling option. With FSR 3, there will be another feature in the near future which, like DLSS 3.0, promises even better frame rates thanks to frame generation.

Performance

The performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT in games without ray tracing is well ahead of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is out of reach for the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. In the in-house duel, the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT can be compared with an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT can be compared.

Power consumption

The power consumption of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is estimated by the manufacturer at 263 watts (TBP) and is therefore significantly more efficient than an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (300 watts). Compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT requires 63 watts more. Also an AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is also more economical at 260 watts.

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 (in 2021).

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).