Review of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti from Nvidia

A new level of performance has been brought to the mass market with the Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB, but only sort of. As of this writing (June 1), the RTX 3060 is available for pre-order for $329. Realistically? At that price point, finding one is about as probable as finding an RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, or RTX 3080 for $399, $499, or $699.

It's not impossible, but it's exceedingly unlikely. Many of the most incredible graphics cards are now powered on Nvidia's Ampere architecture, which is in high demand from gamers and bitcoin miners alike. In theory, Nvidia has introduced firmware and driver codes to identify Ethereum mining.

Affordability And Cost

Beginning on February 25, 2021, the GeForce RTX 3060 will be available for $329. There are some price issues, though. The RTX 3060 does not have a Founder's Edition as the GTX 1660 Ti did with the Turing lineup, unlike prior Nvidia Ampere models For $329, you can get an Nvidia RTX 3060 Black XC, but there will also be many more options.

It's possible that such cards will outperform the EVGA GeForce GTX 3060 Black XC, but only by a small margin. For $249, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is much less expensive than the RTX 3060. Even without the current GPU shortages, it's a significant price increase that some GTX 1060 owners may find difficult to justify.

Chipsets And Features

The GeForce RTX 3060 is built on Nvidia's new Ampere architecture, like the rest of the RTX 3000 series graphics cards. Nvidia's transition from Turing to Ampere is more than simply an increase in the number of products it produces.

The Streaming Multiprocessor datapath is the most significant change in Ampere. Regarding gaming speed, Nvidia has increased the number of cores that can do typical FP32 work, which was previously just half as many as were needed on previous generations' Integer and Floating Point 32 pipelines.

While the RTX 3060 has 28 SMs less than the previous generation's 30 on the RTX 2060, the CUDA core count on the RTX 3060 has increased to 3,584 from the previous generation's 1,920. The RTX 3060 has seen a tremendous rise in gaming workloads.

Design

As one of the cheaper Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 cards, the EVGA GeForce 3060 Black XC lacks some of the more advanced features of its more costly cousin. There's no RGB lighting or unique backplates here, but that's good.

Over the PCB is a heatsink that extends just enough to cover the two EVGA-branded fans on the graphics card. Graphics cards like these have been seen a thousand times, yet because of their simple black color scheme, they can be used in any PC construction.

Small in size but mighty in performance, this is one of the most compact graphics cards on the market. This graphics card can fit in any PC cabinet at 7.94 inches in length.

Benchmarks And Performance

Nvidia is telling people who have been keeping their GTX 1060 that they should switch towards the new card because it is twice as fast. Nvidia is correct, too. Between 80 and 120 percent quicker, the RTX 3060 outperforms the GTX 1060. Only Assassin's Creed Valhalla doesn't benefit significantly from this patch, and even that game doesn't have the most incredible GPU scaling.

Because it was inexpensive and could easily play all the latest games at 1080p with 60 frames per second when the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 arrived back in 2016, it became pretty popular. That strong performance has deteriorated over the previous several years as games have become more visually intensive.

The RTX 3060, on the other hand, is an excellent replacement for the RTX 2080. At 1080p, the RTX 3060 can run next-generation games with ray tracing enabled, which might give it a legacy like that of Nvidia's GTX 1060.

Competition: NVIDIA GeForce RTX3060

This card's primary rival is the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The cheapest Ampere GPU is a good upgrade and can even compete with the 2060 SUPER in terms of performance. Regarding the number of cores, the RTX 3060 comes in at 28 for the RT cores, 112 for the Tensor, and 3,584 for the CUDA.

The RAM is where things begin to get interesting. Regarding the RTX 3060, NVIDIA bumped up the GDDR6 RAM to 12GB, but only 192-bit, resulting in a speed of 360GB/s for the RTX 3060 Ti. It's odd since no game will benefit from the extra 4GB of RAM if the performance isn't there to support it.