AMD Radeon RX 6700S vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

AMD Radeon RX 6700S

The AMD Radeon RX 6700S is a mobile high-end graphics card for gaming laptops. It uses the Navi 22 chip based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. It uses 1,792 of the 2,560 shaders (= 28 CUs), 112 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The 128 Bit memory system connects 8 GB GDDR6 with 2 GHz memory clock. Furthermore, the RX6800S includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. AMD specified 1.9 GHz game clock for 7.9 TFLOPS theoretical FP32 performance at a TDP of 80 Watt. This means the GPU is in theory slower than a Radeon RX 6650M (8,85 TFLOPS). The 6700S is the power saving variant of the RX 6700M.

The gaming performance of the RX 6700S should be similar to the Radeon RX 6650M. AMD specifies the performance similar to a low power RTX 3060. When Raytracing effects are activated, it falls behind the GeForce GPUs.

The Navi 22 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 12GB is high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 8,704 shaders and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory. Compared to the older 10 GB model, the 12 GB model offers more bandwidth and therefore a higher TDP.

The gaming performance in 4k is clearly better than the old GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (approximately 15% faster). Therefore, even demanding games should run with maximum detail settings in 4k. Enabling raytracing will however reduce the framerate and therefore maximum details won't be playable. 

The RTX3080 is produced in 8nm at Samsung and rated at 350 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).