faster than 2080 Super, easily beats 1080 Ti • Eurogamer.net

The rumors were true: the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a real graphics card, and we’ve been testing it for a week. Nvidia promises super-level RTX 2080 performance in a smaller, cheaper and more efficient amp design, and – spoiler alert – that’s exactly what our tests show they delivered.

For £ 370 in the UK, $ 400 in the US and around € 399 in Europe, the 3060 Ti is not enough in mainstream territory, but it’s significantly faster than the RTX 2060 Super it replaces at the same price point and AMD’s competitive Big Navi architecture has yet to debut below $ 580 / £ 530 from the RX 6800. If the Green Team is able to produce these cards in volume – and sell them to actual customers rather than robot farms – they could be a winner.

In terms of specs and underlying architecture, the RTX 3060 Ti uses the same GA104 GPU as the RTX 3070, but with fewer CUDA cores – 4864 versus 5888. The card also runs at slightly slower clock speeds. (1665 MHz increase vs. 1725 MHz) to fit into a lower 20W TDP (200W vs. 220W). The memory subsystems are unchanged, however, with both cards sporting the same 8GB GDDR6 running at 448GB / s. It’s great to see 8GB of VRAM becoming the new standard, with all of the next-gen cards from both teams providing at least as much so far.

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The comparison with the old generation cards is more interesting. The 3060 Ti manages to more than double the number of graphics cores of the 2060 Super, in a smaller die that only consumes a little more power. Looking further back, to the GTX 1060, and the multiplier is closer to 4x – with a corresponding increase in the number of transistors, thanks to the shift from 16nm with Pascal to 12nm with Turing and now 8nm with Amps.

Besides the improvements to compute performance, all the usual features of Nvidia’s Ampere architecture are present and correct, including ray tracing and next-gen tensor cores, so we can expect more performance improvements. noticeable in accelerated RT and AI workloads. We covered Ampere in more detail in our previous RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 reviews, so let’s move on to the physical design of the board.

As usual, we’re testing the Founders Edition of the board, which comes with the same gorgeous industrial design and in the same compact dimensions as the RTX 3070. We have two axial fans in a “flow-through” configuration, with The small, flag-shaped motherboard design and miniature 12-pin power connector allow full use of the last third of the board for cooling. Even the I / O is laid out to maximize airflow, with a single row of display outputs (three DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1) under a 16×5 grid of ventilation cutouts.

As with the other RTX 30 series cards, the 3060 Ti is a PCIe 4.0 device but works on PCIe 3.0 motherboards without any performance loss in the vast majority of gaming workloads. Another invisible feature is the socket. Support for AV1 decoding, which should allow sites like Twitch and Netflix to dramatically increase their resolution, frame rate, and bit rate at a given bandwidth – or reduce bandwidth by up to 50 percent while keeping these metrics. AV1 support isn’t essential right now and is available on newer AMD and Nvidia cards, but it could be a nice icing on the cake for anyone who chooses to upgrade once it hits the mainstream.

One of the biggest questions we asked ourselves when testing the 3060 Ti – beyond its gaming performance, which we’ll get to soon – was about its fuel efficiency. The RTX 3070 was significantly more efficient than its more powerful siblings, so is the 3060 Ti even more efficient?

To answer this question, we use Nvidia’s Power Capture Analysis Tool, or PCAT. This is an interlayer card located between the PCIe slot and the graphics card, as well as between the additional 8 pin power input used by the 3060 Ti and our power supply. This way, we can measure the number of watts drawn by the board itself, rather than the load of the entire system which can vary naturally over time, and plot that power consumption accurately against the frequencies of images to get an idea of ​​the power. used to create each image.

In Death Stranding, the RTX 3060 Ti is almost equivalent to the RTX 3070, requiring 3.064 joules per frame to render our test scene, compared to 2.915 joules per frame for the 3070. AMD’s Big Navi graphics cards perform better in Death Stranding than Nvidia’s Ampere, so we see an even better efficiency rating for the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. So the 3060 Ti uses less power than the 3070, but the decrease in performance is greater than the decrease in power consumption – at least in this test.

Gears 5 is more promising, with the 3060 Ti setting a new record here of 3.163 joules per frame, the 3070 requiring 14% more power per frame and the RX 6800 requiring around 20% more. Normally we would expect the cards from the same family to be laid out in the same order in each deck, so it’s unusual to see the 3060 Ti leading against the 3070 in one test and following another. However, further testing has confirmed our early results, allowing the 3060 Ti to claim the title of “ Most Efficient Amp GPU ” in at least one game. It’s also worth revisiting the RTX 2070 FE, which requires 50% more joules for each frame – Ampere and its move to 8nm really had a solid result in terms of energy efficiency.

With our brief power test complete, it’s time to confirm our test bench specs. You’ll see a few new components here if you haven’t checked out our RTX 30 series reviews yet, but for those of you who are familiar, there are no surprises here. We have a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core frequency of 5 GHz and cooled by a 240mm Alpacool Eisbaer Aurora AiO – which keeps the overclocked system at around 75 ° C at full load.

The 10900K is supported by an Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard and two 8 GB keys from G.Skill Trident Z Royal 3600 MHz CL16. Our games are run from a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe drive provided by Box. The entire platform is powered by an 850W Gamer Storm power supply.

With the staging, let’s start the show with some game benchmarks.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti review

• Introduction, material and power analysis [This Page]
  

• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider – Gameplay Milestones Part 1
  

• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – Gameplay Milestones Part 2
  

• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin’s Creed Unity – Gameplay Milestones, Part 3
  

• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 – RTX Game Benchmarks
  

• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti – The verdict of the digital foundry