Intel Arc 7-Core iGPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Intel Arc 7-Core iGPU

The Intel Arc iGPU with 7 cores is an integrated graphics adapter based on the Xe LPG architecture (similar to the dedicated Arc GPUs, but with a focus on efficiency). It offers 7 of the 8 Xe cores (112 Xe Vector Engines), 7 raytracing units, 7 samplers and probably also 4 pixel backends.

The Arc name may only be used if at least 16 GB RAM is used in dual channel mode. Otherwise, the iGPU is only called "Intel Graphics" and is also significantly slower.

According to Intel, performance has been doubled compared to the previous generation (probably still in Alder Lake).

The iGPU supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (probably DX 12_2 like the desktop Arc GPUs). The graphics unit also supports XeSS AI Super Sampling.

The media engine of Meteor Lake is in the SOC tile and supports up to 8k60 10-bit HDR encode and decode of MPEG2, AVC, VP9, HEVC and AV1. The display engine is also in the SoC tile and supports HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 20G with up to 8K60 HDR.

The GPU Tile of the Meteor Lake chip is manufactured at TSMC on 5nm (5N process).

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).