Key Points
- Gaming consoles rarely come close to the power of a well-put-together gaming PC.
- Factors like shading units, texture mapping units, and render output units influence a GPU’s performance.
- The Xbox Series X GPU is equivalent to the RTX 3060 Ti or Radeon RX 6600 XT in terms of power.
- The Xbox Series X GPU is more powerful than the PlayStation 5 GPU except in terms of VRAM.
While every gaming console on the market claims to be the latest and greatest regarding graphics power and graphical fidelity, the truth is that these systems rarely come close to eclipsing the power of a well-put-together gaming PC. If you’re in the market for a new PC and want to play the same games as your friends on Xbox Series X, you’ll want to invest in a powerful graphics card. So, let’s look at what graphics cards you’ll need to purchase to get the same power as the Xbox Series X GPU on your PC.
How Do You Know How Powerful a GPU Is?
You should consider several components of a GPU when deciding which GPU to purchase. These components influence the GPU’s ability to process and render graphics. You’ll want to consider all of these factors, not just one. Let’s examine the main factors you want to focus on when buying a new GPU.
Shading Units
Shading units are processing cores in the GPU responsible for processing different portions of the overall image displayed on the screen. Different shading units are responsible for various operations, such as geometry, vertex, and pixel shading.
However, shading units alone are a poor indicator of overall performance. Factors like TFLOPs/GFLOPs and memory speed are much better indicators of a GPU’s power.
Texture Mapping Units
Texture mapping units are a specific component of a modern GPU designed to manipulate a bitmap image over a 3D plane as a texture. TMUs can rotate, resize, and distort 2D bitmap images that contain the data for the textures of a 3D model. This allows a plain 3D model to come to life with the textures that distinguish the model from the other models around it.
Render Output Units
Render output units, or raster operations pipelines, are another component of modern GPUs you’ll want to consider when purchasing a new GPU. ROPs are designed to perform one of the last major processes of graphics output, rasterization. Rasterization processes pixel and texel information into a final pixel or depth value using specific vector and matrix operations.
Theoretical Performance
You’ll also want to consider your prospective GPU’s theoretical performance. Theoretical performance is, of course, not a hard number that your GPU will achieve in every situation. It’s merely the maximum that your GPU was able to reach in simulations.
Theoretical performance is typically measured in gigaflops or teraflops. FLOPS stands for “floating point operations per second” and measures graphical power. A gigaflop equals one billion floating point operations per second, while a teraflop is one trillion floating point operations. The more floating point operations your graphics card can perform, the faster and more accurately it can process and render the graphics it’s trying to output.
Theoretical performance is measured in floating point precision. FP16 is half-precision and uses 16-bit numbers instead of the standard 32-bit numbers that FP32 uses. FP64 is double-precision and uses 64-bit numbers instead of 32-bit numbers.
FP64 is far more accurate than FP32 but requires far more computational resources than FP32. Thus, if your calculation won’t suffer from a bit of approximation, most computer engineers would recommend using FP32 to lower resource usage.
©sdecoret/Shutterstock.com
Clock Speed
Clock speed refers to how fast the cores of a GPU are. The faster the cores are, the faster they can process the graphical information. Clock speed is measured in megahertz (MHz), with one megahertz equalling one million hertz. Clock speed in GPUs is essentially the same as clock speed in CPUs. The higher the clock speed, the more processing cycles per second the processor can perform.
GPUs also have a memory clock speed. GPUs have video RAM installed directly into the GPU’s printed circuit board (PCB). The VRAM installed on the PCB has its clock speed. The speed of that memory influences how fast the chipset can write to and read from the VRAM. VRAM will store information like textures and assets that your computer processes to keep your graphics on the screen.
Memory
We’ve mentioned that GPUs come packaged with video RAM. Thus, you’ll also want to check how much memory your new GPU comes pre-loaded with. This specification is straightforward; more memory means your GPU can store more information in the VRAM. When your GPU can store more information like textures and assets, it can draw from those stored assets instead of re-rendering them every time the screen changes.
What GPU Does the Xbox Series X Have? What Are Its Specifications?
We’ll start by identifying the specs of the Scarlett GPU that’s loaded into the Xbox Series X. The Scarlett GPU is produced and manufactured by AMD and is unique to the Xbox Series X. It’s a relatively powerful card, at least by the standards of most console GPUs.
The Scarlett card has 10GB of GDDR6 memory, 3328 shading units, 208 texture mapping units, 64 render output units, and 52 compute units. The GPU clocks at 1825MHz per second, and the memory clocks at 1750MHz per second, giving it an effective clock of 14Gbps.
The Scarlett card also has a theoretical performance of 12.15 TFLOPS at FP32, 759.2 GFLOPS at FP64, and 24.29 TFLOPS at FP16. Overall, this theoretical performance is extremely impressive. It aligns with the medium-range cards for the last PC generation — the generation released at the same time as the Scarlett graphics card — which is unusual for a console graphics card.
Most console graphics cards have historically fallen behind the PC graphics cards of their generations by a wide margin. Still, the Scarlett card is about as strong as the RTX 3060, making it a groundbreaking card for console users who purchased the Xbox Series X.
What PC GPUs Are Equivalent to the Xbox Series X?
Several PC GPUs are equivalent to or better than the Xbox Series X, providing better specs and theoretical and practical performance. The PC equivalent of the Xbox Series X GPU is the RTX 3060 Ti or the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Let’s examine these two graphics cards and determine their differences from the Xbox Series X GPU.
NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti
The NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti is your NVIDIA equivalent to the Xbox Series X GPU. It has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, less than the Xbox Series X GPU. However, the RTX 3060 Ti absolutely demolishes the Xbox Series X GPU in theoretical performance, packing 16.20 TFLOPS of performance at FP32 and FP16 since the card is locked to 1:1 in FP16.
The RTX 3060 Ti is also weaker in FP64 calculations since those calculations are locked to 1:64, giving us a theoretical performance of just 253.1 GFLOPS. However, unless you’re doing a lot of complex scientific simulations, you will likely not see the difference between these two cards in this respect.
Regarding cores and physical processing components, the RTX 3060 Ti packs a punch with 4864 shading units, 152 texture mapping units, and 80 render output units. There are fewer texture mapping units than the Xbox Series X GPU but more shading and render output units. The RTX 3060 Ti also has 38 stream multiprocessing units (the NVIDIA version of compute units,) 38 Ray-Tracing cores, and 152 Tensor Cores. Overall, this GPU is jam-packed with cores to process your games.
- 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- GPU Clock Speed: 1695 MHz
- Boost Clock: 1695 MHz
- 256-bit memory interface
- PCI Express x8 hardware interface
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT
If you’re looking for a budget card and don’t mind getting a little less power, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is an excellent card roughly in line with the Xbox Series X GPU. It does pack a lower theoretical performance at just 10.60 TFLOPS using FP32, 21.21 TFLOPS at FP16, and 662.8 GFLOPS at FP64 (locked to 1:16.)
However, it has faster memory than the Xbox Series X GPU with a theoretical performance of around 16 Gbps. The RX 6600 XT does pack fewer cores in all regards, but it’s the closest equivalent card to the 3060 Ti.
- DirectX ray tracing enhances gaming realism
- High performance with low-noise
- Strong backplate with cooling features
- Solid build quality TORX FAN 4.0 cooling system
- Tailored PCB Design enhances reliability
How Does the Xbox Series X GPU Compare to the PlayStation 5 GPU?
The Xbox Series X GPU is more powerful than the PlayStation 5 GPU in all regards except one. The PlayStation 5 GPU has more VRAM than the Xbox Series X GPU.
Final Thoughts
The GPU world is a competitive market, and with new generations of GPUs coming out all the time, it makes sense to choose a system that has the power to render the graphics you want to see. The Xbox Series X has the most powerful GPU in the history of gaming consoles, but don’t worry! There will be more generations with better GPUs. We just know it!
- $498.00Buy Now on Amazon
- 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- GPU Clock Speed: 1695 MHz
- Boost Clock: 1695 MHz
- 256-bit memory interface
- PCI Express x8 hardware interface
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
11/29/2023 11:49 pm GMT - $308.00Buy on Amazon
- DirectX ray tracing enhances gaming realism
- High performance with low-noise
- Strong backplate with cooling features
- Solid build quality TORX FAN 4.0 cooling system
- Tailored PCB Design enhances reliability
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
12/01/2023 02:36 am GMT
The image featured at the top of this post is ©Alex Van Aken/Shutterstock.com.
