GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce RTX 3050

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce RTX 3050, which has a clock speed of 1552 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 8 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce RTX 3050		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce RTX 3050 should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3050 will be a bit (about 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3050		124160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14960 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce RTX 3050		49664 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17536 (35%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.