NVIDIA T1000 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

NVIDIA T1000

The Nvidia T1000 is a professional desktop graphics card for small entry-level workstations. It is based on the same TU117 Turing chip as the consumer GeForce GTX1650. The number of shader units is also identical at 896. With 8 GB VRAM, the Nvidia T1000 however offers more VRAM, which is still connected via a 128 bit memory bus. The power consumption of the Nvidia T1000 is only rated at 50 watts and therefore does not require an additional power connection.

The professional graphics cards offer certified drivers which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospecting, visualization applications). As a result, the performance in these areas is significantly better compared to consumer graphics cards with the same chip.

In contrast to the more powerful RTX cards (e.g. Quadro RTX 3000), they do not offer ray tracing and tensor cores. The Turing architecture has also seen significant improvements at the CUDA core level. Float and INT operations can now be executed simultaneously, the cache has been standardized and improved and adaptive shading has been introduced. As a result, Nvidia claims up to 50% higher performance per core compared to Pascal.

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).