Should you get AMD’s RX 6700M or Nvidia’s RTX 3060 graphics in your next gaming laptop?
I’ve compared both in 17 games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions to find out the differences!
Here are the differences in specs between these two laptop GPUs. The RTX 3060 has 6
gigs of GDDR6 memory while the RX 6700M has quite a bit more at 10 gigs, but Nvidia’s
memory has more bandwidth and a larger memory bus. CUDA cores and stream processors aren’t
directly comparable, but the 6700M has a higher power limit, at least at maximum.
AMD’s spec sheet lists the 6700M as up to 135 watts, while Nvidia lists the 3060 as up to 115
watts, however it can boost higher in certain scenarios with dynamic boost. AMD also shifts
power between the CPU and GPU with SmartShift which is similar to Nvidia’s dynamic boost.
To do this testing I’m using my Lenovo Legion 5 for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and MSI’s
Delta 15 for AMD’s Radeon RX 6700M. Both laptops have 8 core Ryzen 7 5800H processors,
and both were tested with the exact same physical kit of memory,
16 gigs of DDR4-3200 CL22 x8 single rank memory in dual channel.
Unfortunately I don’t believe the Delta 15 has a full powered RX 6700M. I measured it at about
120 watts in a GPU only stress test but then it quickly dipped to about 115, and with the
CPU also loaded up it was more like 95 watts. This makes sense given the Delta 15 is a thinner laptop
design. More power equals more heat, so they have to have power limits. Now while that doesn’t sound
ideal, at the same time the Delta 15 is the only laptop I’m aware of that currently has the 6700M,
so basically this is the only way I can do this comparison at all, even if it may not be ideal.
Both laptops were tested with an external screen connected to bypass the integrated graphics and
get full performance, so let’s compare both of these in 17 different games at 2 resolutions,
then afterwards we’ll check out pricing and availability,
power draw and content creator workloads.
Let’s start out with Red Dead Redemption 2, which was tested with the game’s benchmark.
I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom and the 1440p results at the top, with the RX 6700M
results above the RTX 3060 results. The 6700M was reaching a 20% higher average frame rate at 1080p,
increasing to a 23% lead at the higher 1440p resolution, the 2nd biggest difference in
favor of the 6700M out of all 17 games tested. This game recently added DLSS support, so I’ve
tested that with the 3060 too. Unfortunately there’s no FSR support for this game as of yet,
so the 6700M can’t also get a further boost. Even with the advantage of DLSS, the 6700M
still had a reasonable 11% lead at 1440p.
Control is a game that tends to favor Nvidia graphics, and sure enough the RTX 3060 was
doing better at 1080p here, granted it’s only 4 FPS ahead, but the 1% lows were 19% higher on
the 3060, so a more stable experience. Things flip around at the higher 1440p resolution though with
the 6700M now having a 13% higher average frame rate. This game also has DLSS support though,
which offers a massive gain to the RTX 3060, again unfortunately there’s no FSR support
here either. Even the 1% lows on the 3060 are far ahead of the average FPS on the 6700M now. I’ve
also tested both with ray tracing enabled to see the differences there. The 3060 could of course
also use DLSS to get a further boost here, but I wanted to compare just pure RT differences.
The 3060 was ahead at 1080p, but they’re quite close at the higher 1440p resolution.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on the other hand is a game that tends to favor Radeon graphics,
which probably explains why this one had an above average lead on the 6700M. At 1080p the 6700M was
reaching 19% higher average FPS, though that said above 60 FPS at the 2nd highest preset
isn’t going to be unplayable or anything on the 3060. The gap closes a little at 1440p,
with the 6700M now 15% ahead of the 3060 and very close to the magic 60 FPS.
Watch Dogs Legion shows us what the 10 gigs of VRAM on the 6700M can do for us. This game had
the biggest gain for the 6700M out of all 17 games tested. There was a warning when running
the game’s benchmark on the 3060, as 6 gigs wasn’t enough. Of course I’m running maxed out with ultra
settings here, so lower setting presets would probably lower the gap, but the 6700M was reaching
1% lows that were higher than even the 3060’s average FPS at both resolutions. Now the 3060
can make use of DLSS to boost performance, but it’s no match for the extra VRAM available to the
6700M which is still ahead, granted I’m testing with DLSS set to quality, so if you’re fine with
sacrificing quality you could probably further increase frame rate with a different DLSS option.
The RTX 3060 was coming out ahead in Cyberpunk 2077 regardless of the resolution,
though it’s just a 2 to 3 FPS difference, nothing major but hey winning’s winning.
This game also has DLSS support though, so the 3060 is able to get a substantial speed boost
by turning this on. Again like the others, no FSR support available here right now.
We’re looking at a 41% higher average frame rate on the 3060 at 1080p, and 59% higher at 1440p.
The 6700M was back in front in Call of Duty Warzone, with a 10% higher average frame
rate at 1080p and 12% higher at 1440p. Like most other games where the 6700M wins though,
it’s not as if the 3060 is offering terrible results. 87 FPS at max settings at the higher
1440p resolution was still playing fine for me. This is yet another game with DLSS support,
and turning this on can give the RTX 3060 the win at both resolutions. We went from the 6700M
having a 12% lead at 1440p prior to DLSS to the 3060 now having a 15% lead over the 6700M.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was doing better with the 3060 graphics for the most part. The 6700M had
a higher 1% low at 1080p, but the 3060 was a few frames ahead in terms of average FPS. The 1% lows
are about the same at 1440p, but the 3060 had a 9% higher average frame rate here, or about 5 FPS.
As an eSports title, you could argue that higher frame rate is more important in Fortnite compared
to most other games that I’ve covered. This one typically does better on Nvidia hardware,
and that’s the case here as the 3060 has its biggest lead over the 6700M
out of all games at 1080p, though it’s only like 6 FPS. The 3060 is still ahead at 1440p,
but now it’s less than a 2 FPS difference to the average frame rate. This game has
DLSS support though, so it’s possible to get some pretty big gains on the 3060 graphics.
F1 2021 was tested with the highest setting preset which enables some ray tracing effects by default,
as denoted at the top of the graph. This could in part be why the 3060 was ahead,
though the lead is small at 1080p with just a couple of FPS difference.
The gap increases at 1440p, but the 6700M is still near 60 FPS here at max settings.
Instead of talking through the rest of the 8 games individually in depth, I’ll
just blast through them so we can get into the average differences as that’s more interesting,
even if all of this testing did take many hours to complete.
A larger selection of games is important to help get a better rounded average.
Feel free to pause the video if you want a closer look at these additional games.
On average over all 17 games tested at 1080p, AMD’s Radeon RX 6700M was reaching about 7%
higher average FPS when compared to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060. The 3060 was still faster in 7
of the games listed at the bottom of the graph, but worst case it’s only a 5% difference. The
6700M was ahead in the other 10 titles and with bigger differences, with the biggest difference
noted in Watch Dogs Legion due to the 6 gigs of vram in the 3060 being a limit in this test.
Stepping up to the higher 1440p resolution and the 6700M still had a 7% lead over the 3060,
however the 3060 was now only ahead in 5 games compared to the 7 at the lower 1080p resolution,
though some of the games the 3060 was doing better in had higher margins at this higher resolution.
In most cases though the 6700M was ahead, but apart from the VRAM limit in Watch Dogs Legion at
max settings, the 6 gigs on the 3060 seems alright at 1440p, at least today. If we instead consider
that game as an outlier, then the 6700M still has a 4% lead on average out of the other 16 games.
I’ve also compared the 6 games that offer DLSS to see how that helps within supported titles.
We’ll just look at 1440p, as I think this is where DLSS can offer a practical benefit,
most games ran nicely at 1080p without it. The 6700M was 12% slower when compared to
the 3060 with DLSS enabled, though this is only an average of 6 games,
and we can see results vary significantly depending on the specific title. The DLSS results
could be boosted further in most games as I chose to test with quality settings where possible.
Now you might be asking where the FSR results are. Fact is, these 17 games are what I’ve been
testing for months now, years in cases of some of them, but FSR just isn’t available in any of
them yet. FSR is still relatively new, and it’s only made an appearance in some newer
games. Now no offence to anyone that plays them but they’re not titles I’ve heard of, at least
compared to the more popular games that we just ran through. Should I have picked some arbitrary
games that do have FSR support and tested them on both laptops, maybe, but I don’t think so. I
didn’t pick any of these games just because they had DLSS. In many cases DLSS was added
after the fact like in Red Dead Redemption 2. I just chose to include some DLSS results because
that’s actually supported in some of the games that I test. It’s just a legitimate advantage
that the RTX 3060 graphics has at the moment, because a lot of games support DLSS whether or
not you like it. Hopefully we can get some more popular games that support FSR in the future.
As for the VRAM differences, for the most part the 6 gigs in the 3060
generally seems to be enough at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions, though this was not always
the case. The one exception seems to be Watch Dogs Legion, where the RX 6700M had huge gains
due to the extra VRAM capacity. This could be an indication of what to expect years from now,
as presumably in future more demanding games at higher resolutions will use more VRAM. It’s hard
to predict, but yeah, perhaps over time I would expect the RX 6700M to get an even bigger lead
over the 3060 due to this difference. But at the same time I don’t think the RTX 3060 is suddenly
going to become unplayable or anything. Fact is I think it’s the best sweet spot on the Nvidia
side today. Personally I wouldn’t be making the purchasing decision purely based on the
VRAM count. We’ve just got no idea how things are going to look in future. Maybe by the time
the VRAM difference starts becoming more major you might be looking at a laptop upgrade anyway.
Just before we get into the price differences I’ve also compared both
laptops in some content creator workloads and we’ll look at the power draw difference.
SPECviewperf tests out various professional 3D workloads,
and the 3060, shown by the purple bars, was still able to come out ahead in a number of tests,
but the 6700M also had some pretty big leads, it just depends on the specific test.
I’ve compared the total system power draw from the wall with both laptops running Control at 4K
max settings with an external screen. The 6700M laptop was drawing 34% more power,
and it was about 13% ahead in terms of average FPS, so there may be an argument
for Nvidia being more efficient, but this game usually performs better with Nvidia graphics,
so without measuring power draw in every single game I can’t really say for sure.
Alright so generally speaking, the RX 6700M was beating the RTX 3060 in most cases.
Honestly this wasn’t too surprising given even AMD seem to be comparing the 3060 with the 6600M,
but I’m still waiting to get that laptop in for testing. But once it’s here I definitely will
compare it to the 3060 as well, so make sure you’re subscribed for that one! I only decided
to make this comparison because when I compared the 6700M against the 3070, the 3070 was ahead,
and yeah it seems like these two are much closer together than that. That said though,
as mentioned the 3060 does of course have the advantage of DLSS which is present in
a number of popular games, and in many cases that does give it the edge over the 6700M.
Both of these laptops ran modern games at high settings even at the higher 1440p resolution
without any problems. None of the games tested crashed on either laptop or anything like that so
driver stability seemed fine. So then what about price difference? Prices of both will
of course change over time, so refer to those links in the description below for updates.
At the time of recording, MSI’s Delta 15, the only gaming laptop currently available with
RX 6700M graphics, goes for $1600 USD in the US, granted this is currently on sale.
Right now, the Lenovo Legion 5 I’ve tested with RTX 3060 graphics is around $1550 USD,
so a little cheaper, but I have seen it for sale for closer to $1400 which would
make it much more attractive from a price to performance perspective.
Honestly if the 3060 laptop is around $100 to 200 less than the 6700M I’d probably just
get the 3060. In many cases the performance difference isn’t that great and you do get
DLSS support. That said if the price difference is closer the 6700M might be worth it. Generally it
does perform better, it has more VRAM, and FSR might be more useful in future. But those last
two points are related to the future, and I don’t really recommend buying based on future promises.
Of course there’s way more to consider when buying a new laptop other than just the GPU performance,
so check out my full review of the MSI Delta 15 over here next to get all the
details about it. I’ve covered everything else like thermals,
battery life and more. Or check this comparison next to see if you should
instead consider the RTX 3070 over the RX 6700M. Make sure you’re subscribed to the
channel for more upcoming laptop comparisons like this one, and come and join me and the
community in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel on Patreon.