Nvidia recently announced the $249 RTX 3050. It’s a return to budget GPUs that Nvidia hasn’t seen in a few years, but given the disappointing release of the recent AMD RX 6500 XT, some caution is warranted. We throw the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 into the ring to see which is better for you.
After finishing our review of the RTX 3050, we took our results and compared them to the RTX 3060. Both cards aim for 1080p AAA gaming, promising 60 frames per second (fps) on the latest high-budget titles, but only one card got a Find the best 1080p graphics cards in our review.
Prices and availability
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Like all graphics cards in 2022, the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 are in huge shortage. The RTX 3050 starts at $249 and the RTX 306o starts at $329, but if you buy either of them after launch day, you’ll end up spending a lot more.
The lack of GPU is still present, and the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 are its victims. On eBay, the RTX 3060 sells for between $700 and $800, with some exceptional deals as high as $650. The RTX 3050 has just launched, so we don’t know what price the scalpers will set. We imagine we’ll find cards between $400 and $500 after the initial supply is depleted.
You have a better chance of getting an RTX 3050 at a retail store. The card goes out the day this review is published: January 25th. There are cards, like the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black, that are listed at $250. Those shares will sell quickly, but if you can get the card at list price, that’s a great deal in today’s market.
In the much more likely scenario that you lost a fraction of a second to buy the card at retail, it’s hard to tell. The RTX 3060 is the most useful card for most people, as our benchmarks below show. But it depends on what price you can find the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 to draw firm conclusions.
Glasses
Retail prices don’t mean much right now, but they do serve as a basis for comparing performance. On paper, there’s around a 28% price difference between the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060. The RTX 3050 is undercut in a number of ways, but not the same 28% overall.
| RTX 3050 | RTX 3060 | |
| CUDA cores | 2,304 | 3,584 |
| RT core | 18 | 28 |
| tensor nuclei | 72 | 112 |
| turn up the clock | 1.74GHz | 1.77GHz |
| memory capacity | 8GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 |
| memory bus | 128 bit | 192 bit |
| memory bandwidth | 224GB/s | 360GB/s |
| TDP | 90W | 170W |
| Price | 249 dollars | 329 dollars |
There is roughly a 43% difference in core count, for example, that applies to CUDA, Ray tracing, and Tensor cores. The slight reduction in boost clock speed doesn’t affect performance much – you can easily boost the RTX 3050 by auto-overclocking the GPU, but the reduced memory can.
Not that the RTX 3050 has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. That’s plenty for modern gaming, especially the 1080p market the RTX 3050 is targeting. The problem is the memory bus. With less memory and a smaller memory bus, the RTX 3050 has approximately 38% less memory bandwidth than the RTX 3060.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
We’ll talk more about this in the next section, but limited bandwidth can cause delays when you first load games. The 4 GB difference is important in massive open-world games with high-resolution textures everywhere. Neither of these cards need massive textures considering they’re aiming for 1080p, so memory disparity is less of a concern.
Fortunately, the RTX 3050 is a great power saver. Limited cores and a slightly slower clock speed bring power consumption down to 90W. This is the first RTX 30-series GPU under 100W, which is ideal for budget builds that don’t want to use a power supply. bulk power just to power the graphics card.
gaming performance
The 28% price difference should translate to performance, but the RTX 3050 far exceeds its weight. There’s around a 23% difference between the two maps across the board, ignoring the weirdly large gap in the fortnite. Here are our results at 1080p with the highest graphics preset:
| RTX 3050 | RTX 3060 | |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 6,749 | 8,629 |
| red dead redemption 2 | 52fps | 65fps |
| Fortnite | 79fps | 132fps |
| Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | 55fps | 64fps |
| battlefield v | 92fps | 123fps |
| Control | 58fps | 76fps |
| cyberpunk 2077 | 47fps | 59fps |
We run all of our tests with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 32 GB of RAM, so the results focus solely on GPU performance. 23% is the number for the overall performance difference, which is perfectly reflected in our 3DMark Time Spy results. Some games have no such difference, such as assassin’s creed valhalla, where the cards are only 15% apart.
The biggest gap we saw was in the Fortnite, where the RTX 3060 outperformed the RTX 3050 by approximately 67%. We have lowered this game from our overall average since it is a live service. Performance can change as new features and maps are added, which explains the above-average results we see on the RTX 3060.
What you can’t see in our results is the minimum frame rate. IN battlefield V, The RTX 3050 produced minimum frames per second in the single digits. In practice, this turned out to be stalling on the first few moves while the assets were being loaded into memory. This isn’t a problem unique to the RTX 3050, but the limited bandwidth doesn’t help.
Benchmark performance is where it should be: The RTX 3050 offers slightly better performance than its price suggests. But the RTX 3060 is still a better option. In big AAA titles like red dead redemption 2 and assassin’s creed valhalla, The RTX 3060 can manage 60 fps at 1080p on the highest graphics settings. RTX 3050 can’t.
The RTX 3050 is not a bad option, especially if you don’t mind reducing the graphics options. But the RTX 3060 offers more realistic performance, sub-60fps on the notoriously demanding Cyberpunk 2077. You’ll get more mileage out of the RTX 3060, even if the RTX 3050 is solid for what it is.
Content creation performance.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
The RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 are primarily focused on gaming. They’re capable of handling some content creation workloads, but if content creation is your primary focus, you’re better off upgrading to a more powerful GPU like the RTX 3070 Ti. Using the same test platform, here are some results for creative workloads:
| RTX 3050 | RTX 3060 | |
| BMW blender (lower the better) | 76 seconds | 45 seconds |
| Blender Classroom (lower is better) | 279 seconds | 208 seconds |
| Blender Koro (the lower the better) | 227 seconds | 162 seconds |
| Pugetbench for Premiere Pro | 766 | 703 |
In our three Blender renders, the RTX 3060 was roughly 40% faster. This means higher bandwidth and larger running memory size, but also a higher number of cores. The RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 may not be graphics cards aimed at creators, but the RTX 3060 comes much closer to that mark.
The RTX 3050 unusually achieved a higher overall score on PugetBench for Premiere Pro. It’s not a huge difference, and Premiere Pro emphasizes the CPU and RAM just as much as the GPU. If anything, our results show that the two cards perform roughly at the same level in PugetBench, with some tests showing variance.
sweet place
The RTX 3060 is great. It’s a 1080p graphics card aiming for the highest graphics settings, even if it’s disappointingly lower than the RTX 3060 Ti. The RTX 3050 isn’t a bad graphics card, but it’s not quite as good as the RTX 3060. Today, it struggles to cope with AAA games at 1080p, and in a few years those problems will seem even worse.
The price is the biggest problem. When initial supplies of RTX 3050 cards run out, it’s hard to say how much cheaper they’ll be than the RTX 3060s, which sell for as much as $850. With today’s GPU prices, it’s better to invest in something that will last a while, and that card is the RTX 3060.
Still, it’s possible that $300 or more could split the two cards in a matter of weeks. In that situation, the RTX 3050 is close enough, unless you can get an RTX 3060 for a particularly good price.
editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn