$329 GPU is good, but out of the 3000 series

Last year’s graphics card review was marked with a dramatic star, and for good reason. Both Nvidia and AMD thought it was a good fit to give the media access to the new graphics cards before starting retail sales. So we are in a comfortable position to pay homage to the two newest products-good price and tremendous power.

Then you see the comments section exploding with unsatisfactory customer questions. How to actually buy. Since then my tweaks to pre-launch previews have been loose.

I say all this in advance. The NVIDIA RTX 3060 goes on sale today on February 25th (12 o’clock EST, if you are interested in joining the sales battle on the first day). Because it’s the first Nvidia GPU I’ve tested in a while to ease the cautious stance. The company had problems with the RTX 3000 series cards in terms of absolute consumer value. The RTX 3060 costs $329 (not to be confused), especially when compared to the previous generation card in its class ($1,499 RTX 3090). 3060 tons) does not pull exactly the same weight. It’s a good 1080p card with a foldable 1440p space, but it’s not the next-generation jump in the Nvidia price category we’re used to.

Also, unlike other newer Nvidia cards, there is no specific reason to invest heavily in this card. This is the encryption function. (This is what Nvidia intended).

Hope your plate is better than mine

Prior to today’s review, Nvidia Ars Technica offered an EVGA version of the RTX 3060, as this model doesn’t receive the Nvidia “Founders Edition” label (the first of all major RTX cards). This 3060 variant keeps it simple in terms of construction. Two conventional fans are mounted below, and there is no “crossover” fan structure found on Nvidia’s FE, and it is not advertised as an exclusive supercharged cooling option. There is no built-in smart fan, but this model has a great, quiet performance on stock watches and does not exceed 65°C at full load.

Unfortunately, for our test machine, we had to go through unusual steps to disassemble the EVGA mounting board so that it doesn’t interfere with the ability to insert the GPU into the case. In my anecdotal case, this was the first time I’ve done this with a GPU that Ars has reviewed or tested for 7 years (although it’s mostly done on stock models Nvidia and AMD, not a variety of OEMs). .

Thankfully, for testing purposes I was able to reliably find an EVGA GPU on my device and at that point I started comparing it to the nearest GPU I owned. RTX 2060 Super launches for $399 in July 2019. This model was a desperately needed upgrade to the lukewarm RTX 2060, and arrived as a good enough option for gamers looking for overall solid 1080p performance with a 1440p option. And It’s an inexpensive way to dive into the world of deep learning ray tracing and supersampling (DLSS) for Nvidia.

In my tests, I found that the “$70 cheapest” GPU (priced in the market without a magic racket) generally fell to the neck and neck with a July 2019 card instead of blowing up the previous model. This seems to boil down to consideration of the nature of the bid and the spec tables for both cards. The RTX 3060 has over 150% of the GDDR6 VRAM and more than 150% of the 2060 Super’s CUDA cores, with a bit of lead on the base clock. However, VRAM is not the same type as it has been downgraded to 192 bits on a 256 bit bus with less memory bandwidth. It is also difficult to calculate the tensioner core and the RT core and compare the “RTX” function of each card. This is because the RTX 3060 has fewer cores than the RTX 2060 Super in both cases, despite being the “newest” generation of each.

All of the above benchmarks were done on a standard Ars tester with a combination of i7-8700K CPU (overclocking to 4.6GHz), 32GB DDR4-3000 RAM, PCI-e 3.0 NVMe and standard SSD drive.

The first question mark came out when I saw the RTX 2060 Super outperform the RTX 3060 in various 3DMark benchmarks. The older cards showed a 6.5% performance improvement in the live muscle GPU test (“Fire Strike Ultra”), and slightly outperformed the new performance when it came to head-to-head 3DMark ray tracing.

Based on this knowledge, I got a standard Nvidia table available to press members. This is in line with most other tests, but the results were more compassionate for the new RTX 3060 than me. Where Nvidia Found The Witcher 3 And Cyberpunk 2077 (Ray Tracing Disabled) My personal and reproducible benchmark in “Dead to” between 3060 and 2060 Super, which I tested at 4K resolution, made my old card stand out. Grand Theft Auto V, Running 2.9% faster on the 2060 Super in 4K, doesn’t appear in the benchmark tables provided by Nvidia.

However, the rest of the tests showed that the RTX 3060 generally improved gaming performance. Many of the best results came when certain standardized metrics included the effects of ray tracing, but even with pure old-fashioned raster cards, they had a noticeable progress of 9% in non-RT tests.