RTX 3060 review: solid performance, but at what cost?

It’s a weird time to review a graphics card. I spent the last week testing a GeForce RTX 3060, Nvidia’s latest GPU, but was only able to do so because the company sent Polygon a review unit. If you’re a member of the public, it’s next to impossible to get your hands on a graphics card from Nvidia or AMD. This is the result of a confluence of factors, including a global semiconductor shortage (which limits production capacity) and soaring values ​​of cryptocurrency such as Ethereum (which is fueling increased demand. GPUs, as they can be used for mining operations).

All of this is relevant to a review of the RTX 3060, especially because it is the cheapest offering in Nvidia’s 30-series GPU lineup, with an MSRP starting at $ 329.99. That just happens to be the price of the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming, the card that Nvidia sent us because the company doesn’t produce a Founders Edition for the RTX 3060.

Price-conscious gamers looking for a new graphics card right now may be forced to buy something at an inflated price and / or get a different GPU than the RTX 3060. Considered in a vacuum, the RTX 3060 is a very good mid-range graphics card for people looking to play games at resolutions up to 1440p. But we don’t live in a vacuum, so the best I can do is assess the GPU itself and provide some context on the current market.

Nvidia released the RTX 3060 in late February, about three months after the RTX 3060 Ti launched. This card, which starts at $ 399, offers plenty of wiggle room at 1440p, although it isn’t designed for 4K gaming. The RTX 3060, on the other hand, is a 1080p-oriented GPU at heart that can also handle 1440p. I was particularly interested in trying it, because my desktop is connected to a 1080p display – well, a 1920×1200 60Hz monitor, to be precise – and because its processor, a quad-core Intel Core i5-7500 at 3.4 GHz, is an older chip that barely meets the minimum specifications for some of the latest games.

The RTX 3060 I tested is a standard dual-slot GPU with a pair of large fans that keep the card pretty quiet. I noticed there was an increase in noise compared to my existing Gigabyte RTX 2060 Super – when it boots up the RTX 3060 is a bit louder – but that makes sense, as the Gigabyte GPU has three fans. .

The EVGA card’s port array includes a single line of three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and one HDMI 2.1 output. (I can’t test any HDMI 2.1 functionality because I don’t have a display that supports it.) And unlike the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti, whose Founders edition relies on the new 12-pin power connector. from Nvidia, the RTX 3060 gets by with a traditional eight-pin connection. It consumes 170W of power, with a recommended power supply of 550W.

As far as the power of the RTX 3060 goes, well, it’s not a slam-dunk upgrade unless you’re coming from something as old as, say, a GTX 10-series card.

Now, that might not be surprising for a GPU which is the cheapest ray tracing capable card since Nvidia lowered the price of the RTX 2060 to $ 299 in January 2020. And since I come from a RTX 2060 Super – which has only one generation. , released in July 2019 – I didn’t expect to be blown away by the RTX 3060. Indeed, its performance will greatly depend on the specifics of your own PC and, of course, the games you play.

The RTX 3060 can certainly offer significant advantages over the RTX 2060 Super (and even older GPUs, obviously). Trying Wolfenstein: Youngblood at 1920×1200 on maximum settings my average frame rate in the Riverside and Lab X benchmarks went from around 124 fps with the RTX 2060 Super to around 170 fps with the RTX 3060 – an increase of around 38% .

I once activated ray tracing (which Youngblood supports only for reflections), the improvement was less but still impressive. At Riverside, the average frame rate increased from 88 fps with the RTX 2060 Super to 109 fps with the RTX 3060, an increase of almost 24%; in Lab X, the figure jumped from 75 fps to 91.5 fps, a jump of 22%. And I was able to recover some images while maintaining the image quality by activating Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology.

I have also had good results with the RTX 3060 in Control, a great showcase for ray tracing. Previously, I had played the entire game using my RTX 2060 Super with all five ray tracing effects turned up. In stress tests like the hallway above the NSC control room and intense battles in the Central Research Atrium, the frame rate typically hovered between 45 and 60 fps. Of course, that was with DLSS enabled, which makes the game play at an internal resolution of 1280×800 – two-thirds of 1920×1200 native to my monitor. When playing with the RTX 3060 using these same settings, the frame rate was generally in a more playable 60-75 fps range, with rare drops in the mid-1950s.

However, my crispy PC and I had a very different experience with Hitman 3, a game whose complex underlying simulation relies heavily on processor power. If you’re stuck with a 4 year old processor that isn’t even a Core i7 chip like me, take note of my results.

At 1920×1200 on maximum settings, replacing my RTX 2060 Super for the RTX 3060 improved the frame rate by less than 10% for both static game benchmarks – from 99.92 fps to 106.92 fps in Dubai (7.01%) and from 103.85 fps to 112.99 fps on Dartmoor (8.8%). When I enabled upsampling to 1.3x (to approximate game performance at around 1440p resolution) and 2x (to approximate 4K) the gains got even thinner. With 2x oversampling enabled, the average frame rate on Dartmoor only increased from 42.68 fps to 43.87 fps – just 2.79%.

So what’s the verdict? In my experience, you should be able to run games at high settings at maximum with the RTX 3060 if you’re playing at 1080p / 1200p. And you’ll see a significant benefit if you upgrade from something older than Nvidia’s 20 Series cards; even with ray tracing enabled, you can play at 60 fps as long as the game in question also supports DLSS.

But people with 1440p monitors would be better served by the RTX 3060 Ti instead (if they can find it in stock, that is). While it’s possible we could start to see a series of games that would make the most of the RTX 3060’s 12GB of GDDR6 video memory, it’s hard to imagine the 8GB of RAM on the other cards in the series. 30 from Nvidia (with the exception of the RTX 3090.) soon becoming a major bottleneck. And in his review of the RTX 3060 at The Verge, my colleague Sean Hollister found that the RTX 3060 Ti “almost always” “15% to 35% faster” than the RTX 3060 when playing at maximum settings at 1440p. . At $ 399 – a premium of $ 70, or 21.2%, over the MSRP of the RTX 3060 – you’ll just get better value.

Of course, as I noted, it all depends on whether you can find one of these graphics cards (and at their retail prices, to boot). If you have the option of purchasing an RTX 3060 and it makes sense for your particular situation – your screen resolution, the age of the GPU you’re replacing, and your budget – this is a solid card that should provide some notable upgrade. You will need to make this call yourself.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is now available. (Theoretically.) This review was conducted using an EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming supplied by Nvidia, on the author’s PC, which contains an Intel Core i5-7500 processor and 16GB of RAM. All games tested were installed on a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find more information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.