Nvidia RTX 3060 review: a $ 329 GPU, but ho-hum among the 3000 series

The past year of graphics card reviews has been an exercise in dramatic asterisks, and for good reason. Nvidia and AMD have seen fit to ensure members of the press have access to new graphics cards ahead of their retail launch, which has put us in a comfortable position to praise each of their latest offerings. generation: good prices, tons of power.

Then we see our comment sections explode with dissatisfied customers wondering how the heck to actually buy them. I’ve since sweetened my tune on these pre-launch previews.

I’m saying all of this up front about the Nvidia RTX 3060, which goes on sale today, February 25 (at 12 p.m. ET, if you’re interested in entering the day one sales melee) because it’s the first Nvidia GPU I tested in a while to make my cautious stance easier. The company has been torn apart with its RTX 3000 series of cards in terms of consumer value, especially compared to previous-gen equivalent cards (the $ 1,499 RTX 3090 notwithstanding), but the $ 329 RTX 3060 (at not to be confused with that of December. 3060 Ti) does not pull quite the same weight. It’s a good 1080p card with 1440p room for flexibility, but it’s not the next-gen leap in its Nvidia price bracket we’ve grown used to.

Plus, unlike other modern Nvidia cards, this one lacks a particular back-up reason to invest so much: the potential for cryptomining. (And that’s intentional on Nvidia’s part.)

I hope your plate is better than mine

Prior to today’s review, Nvidia provided Ars Technica with an EVGA version of the RTX 3060, as this model will not receive the Nvidia “Founders Edition” label (the first for any main RTX card). This 3060 variant simplifies things in terms of construction, with two traditional bottom-mounted fans and none of the “passthrough” fans found in Nvidia’s FEs, and it isn’t advertised with any particular supercharged cooling options. Despite the lack of a clever fan design, this model runs cool and quiet to stock clocks, never exceeding 65 ° C at full load.

Unfortunately for my test rig, however, I had to take the unusual step of unscrewing the EVGA mounting plate so that it didn’t block my ability to insert the GPU into my case. In my anecdotal case, this was the first time I had to do this with a GPU that I have reviewed or tested in my seven years at Ars (although, admittedly, this has mostly been with the stock models of Nvidia and AMD, as opposed to a wide variety of OEMs).

Fortunately, I was always able to stably locate the EVGA GPU in my machine for testing, so I started comparing it to the closest GPU I had in my possession: the RTX 2060 Super, released. in July 2019 for $ 399. This model was a much-needed upgrade from the lukewarm RTX 2060, and it arrived as a good option for gamers who wanted robust 1080p performance across the board, along with plenty of 1440p options. and a reasonable way to dip your toes into the worlds of ray tracing and Nvidia’s proprietary Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

During my testing, I found that the “$ 70 cheaper” GPU (at a magical market price and no scalping) typically landed neck and neck with the July 2019 card, instead of blowing up the card. ‘old model. It seems to boil down to the give-and-take nature of the specification tables on the two cards. The RTX 3060 has over 150% of the CUDA cores of the Super 2060, along with 150% of the GDDR6 VRAM and a slight lead in the base clocks. But its VRAM is certainly not the same type, downgraded from a 256-bit bus to a 192-bit bus with lower memory bandwidth. In addition, comparing the proprietary “RTX” potential of each card by counting the tensor cores and the RT cores is tricky, as the RTX 3060 has fewer cores than the RTX 2060 Super in both cases, although the “older” generations. recent ”of each.

All of the above tests were done on my standard Ars test bench, which sports an i7-8700K processor (overclocked 4.6GHz), 32GB of DDR4-3000 RAM, and a mix of a PCI- drive. e 3.0 NVMe and SSD standard.

My first question mark came when I saw the RTX 2060 Super beat the RTX 3060 in a variety of 3DMark benchmarks. The old card enjoyed a performance lead as high as 6.5% in a simple GPU (“Fire Strike Ultra”) muscle test, and it even beat the newer card, albeit marginally, in a showdown. face to face 3DMark ray-tracing.

With that knowledge in hand, I grabbed an Nvidia benchmark chart provided to members of the press, which aligned with most of my other tests, albeit with somewhat more charitable results for the new RTX 3060 than mine. Where Nvidia found that The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (ray tracing disabled) were “dead even” between the 3060 and the 2060 Super as tested in 4K resolution, my personal and repeatable benchmarks gave the old card a lead. Grand Theft Auto V, which runs just 2.9% faster on the 2060 Super in 4K, does not appear in the benchmark table provided by Nvidia.

But the rest of my testing showed that the RTX 3060 generally had a head start on gaming performance. Many of the best results were when a given benchmark included ray tracing effects, but even As a pure, old-fashioned rasterization card, it often enjoyed a noticeable 9% lead over non-RT tests.