Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 review: It’s fine - piercehurse1967

At a Glance

Expert's Military rank

Pros

No-compromises 1080p gaming
12GB of storage
Nvidia's excellent software/features: G-Sync, DLSS, Reflex, and more
EVGA's Cardinal Black Gaming is small, unfriendly, and quiet

Cons

1440p gaming often requires visual tweaks to hit 60fps
Somewhat more performance, slightly less price vs. last gen
MSRP is high than we'd like
Challenging to find at MSRP in today's enthusiastic GPU commercialize
No backplate or other frills in EVGA's XC Black Gambling

Our Verdict

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 is an okay artwork card for no-compromises 1080p gaming in a time where being good is complete it takes to sell up. EVGA's custom XC Black Play version offers no frills but runs cool and quiet.

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The $329 GeForce RTX 3060 eventually brings Nvidia's next-gen Ampere GPU computer architecture to the mainstream masses—at least in theory.

Normally, the release of Nvidia's 60-class artwork cards sparks a lot of excitement. They tend to be the popular card of a GeForce multiplication. This time around, art card game are mired in a months-long shortage driven by a assortment of sky-high exact, logistics woes caused by the pandemic, a cryptocurrency boom that's driving miners to garbage down GPUs, and some component shortages. Nvidia too priced this card higher than historical norms (the beloved GTX 1060 this card hopes to replace launched at $80 less). It's a perfect ramp, and things are so bad that Nvidia brought the past GTX 1050 Ti out of retirement.

But put all that divagation. How does Nvidia's new GPU really handle? The troupe sent U.S.A an EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Ninety Black Gaming to limit just that. This entry-charge twisting connected the GPU is priced at the RTX 3060's $329 MSRP (again, in theory). If we had to describe the nontextual matter card in one discussion? It's pure. It's okay. That said, there are much key under-the-hood features definitely Charles Frederick Worth noting.

In front we Wade into pages of benchmark results, if you want a faster, easier-to-read analysis of the card, be sure to check out our complemental coverage, GeForce RTX 3060: 5 key things you need to know about Nvidia's new GPU. Straightaway let's dig in.

GeForce RTX 3060 specs, features, and price

In an unusual turn of events, Nvidia released the step-functioning GeForce RTX 3060 Ti before the base RTX 3060, and that Ti version is a spectacular 1440p gaming option. The more affordable (in theory) GeForce RTX 3060 more nearly targets no-compromises 1080p gaming, though 1440p gaming is certainly possible in most cases. The not-Te RTX 3060 uses a totally dissimilar GPU—the smaller GA106 nontextual matter chip, rather than the beefier GA104 crisp found in the Ti model and the $500 RTX 3070. Because of that, while the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti part the same bring up, they're wildly different under the hood.

Here's how the GeForce RTX 3060 stacks up technically against the RTX 3060 Ti…

…and last-generation's $350 GeForce RTX 2060.

The GeForce RTX 3060 sports a slightly higher boost time than its Ti cousin—which matters during gaming sessions that load astir the GPU—but dramatically fewer CUDA cores. That drags the overall gaming operation far under the 3060 Ti's level, though the new art lineup remains competitive for the segments it targets.

The about interesting partially of the RTX 3060's design is its retentiveness. This GPU is paired with an ample 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, besting the 8GB of GDDR6 in the RTX 3060 Si and 3070, and even the 10GB free in the unpleasant GeForce RTX 3080 (although that's of the much-quicker GDDR6X variety). It's clear that AMD's decisiveness to load up its new Radeon RX 6000-serial graphics card game with plenty of remembering caught Nvidia by surprise. The 192-bit memory bus on the RTX 3060 can palm either 6GB or 12GB capacities, and we suspect the RTX 3060 was earlier intended to experience 6GB earlier AMD struck.

nvidia resizable bar — Resizable BAR lets the CPU tap full into the GPU's store, offering performance gains in whatever scenarios.

It's probably the right-minded choice from a marketing perspective—AMD's outgoing Radeon RX 6700 XT bequeath indeed come with with 12GB of its own—but practically, it's a bit unearthly. The big 12GB memory buffer store is overkill for the 1080p gaming Nvidia claims this card was collective for. If you nudge games up to 1440p, you'll often take to reduce graphics settings to achieve 60 frames per second at that solvent, which similarly reduces memory demands. If this wasn't a rushed response to AMD's moves, 8GB of memory would suffice–and cost less. Going with 6GB of memory would've been too little now that whatsoever games are pushing the 8GB barrier many on a regular basis, however, so as-is, we'ray glad to construe the RTX 3060 ship with 12GB. Overkill is better than undershooting!

The GeForce RTX 3060 is also Nvidia's first background nontextual matter card to support the PCIe Resizable BAR feature, following in the footsteps of AMD's Smart Access code Memory (which is founded around ReBAR). Resizable BAR lets your CPU pick up your graphics card's memory, rather than accessing information technology in 256MB chunks, which stool result in performance gains on compatible systems. Most of those gains are modest, as we discovered examination Smart Approach Memory along the RX 6900 XT, but they sack go all the way to 10 percent or Thomas More in the right games, running the word-perfect graphics settings and resolutions. ReBAR's uplift is highly variable.

You'll need a compatible CPU and motherboard to enable Resizable BAR support, however. AMD kicked it bump off with its Ryzen 5000 processors and X570/B550 motherboards, though compatibility has also refer a variety of Intel platforms via BIOS updates. The image higher up, taken from Nvidia's ReBAR explainer, shows which PC hardware currently supports the technology. Support varies from vendor to seller and even motherboard to motherboard. If you want to consumption it, seek a compatible BIOS update for your taxon motherboard. Currently, Nvidia activated ReBAR compatibility for only eight titles, and so its usefulness is very limited. Nvidia says it leave whitelist new games quickly. (AMD's Wise Accession Computer memory works with totally games.)

Nvidia besides added a hashrate limiter that cuts the public presentation of Ethereum mining in one-half, which should hopefully discourage cryptocurrency miners from snatching this up in droves. We'll see if it lasts.

Naturally, as a late GeForce GPU, the RTX 3060 includes the latest ray tracing and tensor cores internal (we'll dig into that later), besides as support for all of Nvidia's wide range of value-adding features, so much as Shadowplay, DLSS, Nvidia Broadcast, Nvidia Physiological reaction, G-Sync, and more. For a deeper look at what's new in the RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPU architecture, check outgoing our much more elaborate explanation in the offse of our RTX 3080 review.

EVGA RTX 3060 XC Bootleg Gaming design

Nvidia isn't rolling out one of its snazzy Founders Edition models for the RTX 3060, relying rather on custom cards from its partners to carry the load in now's hot-skilled graphics card market. (GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 FE models hit the streets, for reference.) And then the company transmitted over EVGA's GeForce RTX 3060 XC Dark Gaming for the States to test.

The XC Black Gaming sticks to the RTX 3060's reference spectacles under the hood, which helps it hit the GPU's $329 retail price. That helps us evaluate the RTX 3060's baseline carrying into action, though if previous RTX 30-serial and Radeon RX 6000-series launches are any indication, we expect graphics card makers to put most of their focus (and manufacturing output) happening pricier custom models, like EVGA's own overclocked, $390 RTX 3060 XC Gaming (no "Black"). Most of the archeozoic custom RTX 3060 models on hand in stores monetary value closer to $500 even before scalpers get their hands on them. Don't expect to be fit to find RTX 3060 card game along sales event for $330 actually while the current GPU scraunch remains operative.

EVGA fashioned the XC Bleak Play well despite its MSRP pricing. As you'll see later, the card runs very cool and really quiet. Unlike most other custom RTX 30-serial publication graphics cards, the XC Black Gaming sticks to a traditional ii-slot thickness that should have no problem fitting into most PC cases, especially because the lineup measures a mere 7.94 inches in length—well shorter than the usual 10.5 inches-plus. IT too requires just a single 8-pin power connection, hooked up to a suggested mightiness supply of 550 watts operating room to a greater extent.

Be-cutting measures terminate easily be spotted. The cerement is plastic, there's No RGB lighting to be found, and there's no backplate to hide circuitry. There is a perforated-call at the PCB to allow air to run over through the heat sink and out of your wag, however, following the new RTX 30-series trend. The want of a backplate makes the EVGA XC Black Play a bit of an eyesore in an era where backplates have largely become the norm, merely it's otherwise offenceless aesthetically, with a blacked-out design. You'll find the standard RTX 30-series connection loadout—same HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPorts—happening EVGA's card.

EVGA supports its hardware with a warranty and customer service representatives beloved by the gaming community of interests. If you want to put the two-fold-mechanism fans and four copper heatpipes to more work, the fellowship's high-minded Precision X1 GPU management software contains everything you need to monitor and overclock the card. The glibly designed program is one of our favorites.

But now the stage is solidifying. Let's get to the benchmarks.

Next page: Our test system, gaming benchmarks begin

Our psychometric test organisation

We'rhenium in the action of wiggly to a new AMD Ryzen 5000-serial mental test cheat to embody able to benchmark the effect of PCIe 4.0 support on contemporary GPUs, as well as the public presentation-boosting AMD Smart Access Memory and Nvidia Resizable Ginmill features (which are some based on the same underlying PCIe standard). Currently, we're testing it on an open bench with AMD's Wraith Goop air tank; in the future, we'll be moving the apparatus into a case and adding an NZXT Kraken liquid cooler to the commingle. Most of the ironware was provided by the manufacturers, but we purchased the storage ourselves.

AMD Ryzen 5900X, stock settings
AMD Wraith Max cooler
MSI Godlike X570 motherboard
32GB G.Skill Trident Z Modern DDR4 3800 memory
EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 power supply ($352 along Amazon)
1TB SK Hynix Gold S31 SSD

We're comparison the $330 EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Play against last generation's $350 Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition, also as the Founders Edition mold of the newer $500 RTX 3070. We as wel enclosed EVGA's overclocked, tradition FTW3 Ultra version of the $400 RTX 3060 Ti as we didn't experience Nvidia's FE card immediately on hand. Rounding things out, we also show benchmarks for AMD's $350 Radeon RX 5700 and $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT. We didn't have time to fully benchmark the $400 RTX 2060 Super FE and $500 RTX 2070 on the new system yet, alas.

We try a smorgasbord of games spanning various engines, genres, vendor sponsorships (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel), and graphics APIs (DirectX 11, DX12, and Vulkan). Each game is tested using its in-game benchmark at the highest possible graphics presets unless otherwise noted, with VSync, frame rate caps, real-time shaft of light tracing OR DLSS effects, and FreeSync/G-Sync disabled, along with any other vendor-specialized technologies like FidelityFX tools Beaver State Nvidia Reflexive. We've also enabled lineament anti-aliasing (TAA) to push these cards to their limits. We run each benchmark at to the lowest degree three times and list the intermediate result for each test.

We North Korean won't be providing comment for each stake's results. For gross operation evaluations, check out our final "Should you buy up IT?" incision of this follow-up.

Play performance benchmarks

Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Hostis uncomparable of the opening games to debut on incoming-gen consoles. Ubisoft upgraded its Interrupt engine to include cutting-edge features like real-time ray tracing and Nvidia's DLSS. We disable those effects for this testing, butHost remains a energetic spirited yet along high-end hardware with its optional high-resolution texture wad installed. The gritty allocates more 8GB of memory even at 1440p. Oof.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Yep, PlayStation exclusives are coming to the Personal computer right away.Celestial horizon Zero Dawn runs on Guerrilla Games' Decima locomotive engine, the same railway locomotive that powersDeath Stranding. It launched in a rough state simply handles much better now, and it's a looker.

Close foliate: gaming benchmarks continue

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics puts it personal brutal, expedited-paced spin on theXCOM-like writing style. This Unreal Engine 4-powered game was built from the ground up for DirectX 12, and we love being fit to work a tactics-elan brave into our benchmarking entourage. Better yet, the game comes with a plethora of graphics options for PC snobs. More games should devote so much dotty care to explaining what flipping all these visual knobs hateful.

You can't use the presets to benchmarkGears Tactics, As it intelligently scales to work best along your installed computer hardware, meaning that "Immoderate" on combined graphics card can incumbrance different settings than "Ultra" on a weaker card. We manually put on all options to their highest possible settings.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is more fun when you can play cooperatively with a buddy, but it's a fearless experiment—and an absolute technical showcase. Running on the Vulkan API,Youngblood achieves blistering frame rates, and it supports whol sorts of cutting-edge technologies wish ray tracing, DLSS 2.0, HDR, GPU culling, asynchronous computing, and Nvidia's Content Adaptive Shading. The unfit includes a reinforced-in bench mark with deuce different scenes; we at once test Riverside.

Metro Exodus

One of the best games of 2019,Subway system Exodusremains one of the advisable-looking games close to, too. The latest version of the 4A Engine provides improbably luscious, ultra-elaborated visuals, with one of the most disorienting historical-time ray tracing implementations released yet. The Extreme graphics preset we benchmark give the axe melt even the most herculean modern ironware, as you'll check below, though the game's Ultra and Postgraduate presets still look favourable at much higher frame rates.

We test in DirectX 12 mode with ray tracing, Hairworks, and DLSS disabled.

Borderlands 3

Borderlands is back! Gear case's game defaults to DX12, so we bash as well. It gives us a glance at the ultra-popular Unreal Locomotive 4's operation in a traditional shooter. This game tends to favor AMD hardware.

Strange Brigade

Strange Brigade is a cooperative third-person hitman where a team of adventurers blasts through hordes of mythological enemies. Information technology's a technological showcase, assembled around the next-gen Vulkan and DirectX 12 technologies and infused with features like HDR support and the ability to toggle asynchronous reckon on and off. It uses Rebellion's custom Azure engine. We test exploitation the Vulkan renderer, which is faster than DX12.

Next page: gaming benchmarks continue

Total Warfare: Troy

The current game in the popularTotal War saga,Troywas acknowledged away free for its starting time 24 hours on the Epic Games Store, moving over 7.5 one thousand thousand copies before IT went on proper sale.Tot War: Troy is built using a modified version of theTotal War: Warhammer 2 engine, and this DX11 title looks stunning for a turn-based strategy game. We test the more intensive battle benchmark.

F1 2020

The latest in a long line of successful racing games,F1 2020is a gem to test, supplying a wide range of both graphical and benchmarking options, making information technology a much more reliable (and fun) option that theForzaserial. It's built on the latest variant of Codemasters' buttery-smooth Self-importance mettlesome engine, complete with support for DX12 and Nvidia's DLSS technology. We run ii laps on the Australia course, with clear skies on and DLSS off.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider concludes the bring up trilogy, and it's inactive utterlygorgeous a couple of days after its debut. Square Enix optimized this game for DX12 and recommends DX11 only when you're using older hardware or Windows 7, so we test with DX12.Shadow of the Grave Raider uses an enhanced adaptation of the Foundation railway locomotive that also poweredGrow of the Tomb Freeboote and includes ex gratia time period ray tracing and DLSS features.

Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Captain Hicks Siege still dominates the Steam clean charts years after its launch, and Ubisoft supports it with frequent updates and events. The developers sustain poured a ton of go into the game's AnvilNext engine all over the days, eventually rolling out a Vulkan version of the game that we use to test. Past default, the game lowers the render scaling to increase frame rates, but we set IT to 100 percent to benchmark pure rendering performance on graphics cards. Even still, frame rates soar.

Next page: RTX 3060 ray tracing performance

RTX 3060 ray tracing performance

We also benchmarked the RTX 3060 in a handful of titles that support cutting-edge real-time ray trace effects. Piece the newer AMD Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs now support ray tracing, older models don't, so we excluded the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT from these results.

Nvidia holds a key advantage in shaft of light-traced games thanks to its Mystifying Encyclopedism Ace Sampling engineering (DLSS), which leverages AI tensor cores integrated in RTX GPUs to internally render games at a glower resolution, then uprez them to your desired resolution victimization motorcar learning to fill in the gaps. DLSS 2.0 whole caboodle like black magic and gives Nvidia a strong lead in irradiatio tracing performance. Without it, you usually can't run irradiate-copied games supra 1080p result.

The Nvidia GPUs we included below all support DLSS, however, and we've shown three results for each card: native performance with ray tracing off, native carrying out with light beam tracing happening, and performance when both ray tracing and DLSS are active.

We plan to boom our shaft-traced game suite presently, but for now we'Re giving Watch Dogs: Legion, Subway system: Exodus and Shadow of the Grave Raider a whirl to put the capabilities to the test, with ray tracing options set to Ultra in each title. Legion packs irradiatio-traced reflections, Tomb Raider includes ray-traced shadows, and Subway system features more strenuous (and humour-enhancing) ray-traced global illumination.

Let's kvetch things off with Shadow of the Tomb Raider's ray-traced shadows. The game includes the first-generation rendering of DLSS, which doesn't support 1080p resolve, thusly we've stuck to raw ray tracing performance merely there.

Metro: Exodus uses shaft tracing for world illumination. It also uses DLSS 1.0 and doesn't support the upscaling feature at 1080p, indeed we've only included underdone ray trace performance on that chart.

Watch Dogs: Legion hammers your system of rules regardless of whether you ingest ray trace on, at least with the malodourous-resolution texture pack installed. Activating the ray-traced reflections exacerbates the emergence. Unequal Tomb Raider and Metro, Watch Dogs uses the faster, better DLSS 2.0 technology. We test IT with DLSS Balanced mode active. Balanced lets you hit higher frame rates than the Quality style, but the even faster Performance mode starts to introduce visual differences you can placard in close to scenes. Equal hits the sweet spot.

Next page: Top executive, thermals, and noise

Power draw, thermals, and noise

We essa mogul draw past looping theF1 2020 benchmark at 4K for about 20 minutes after we've benchmarked everything else and noting the highest version on our Watts Dormy Pro meter, which measures the power using up of our entire test arrangement. The initial part of the race, where all competing cars are onscreen simultaneously, tends to be the most needy portion.

This isn't a last-case test; this is a GPU-fettered game running at a GPU-bound resolution to gauge performance when the artwork card is sudation knockout. If you'Ra playacting a game that also hammers the CPU, you could see high overall system power draws. Consider yourself warned.

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 90 Black Play draws a bit more power than the RTX 2060, which makes sense given its slightly higher power requirements. This GPU's zip requirements aren't as staggering As they are for the high-end RTX 30-series GPUs. It'll Be interesting to see how AMD's eventual Radeon rivals testament compare.

Interestingly, Nvidia GPUs prevent the computer from to the full expiration into idle in the five minutes of downtime we use for this test, though it does so after a longer continuance. That's newfound to this Ryzen 5900X platform; we didn't find out IT on our old Intel-based testbeds, nor with AMD Radeon graphics cards installed. We'll have to change our methodological analysis going forward and poke around the behavior to understand it more fully.

We test thermals by leaving GPU-Z open during theF1 2020 power attractor test, noting the highest maximum temperature at the end.

EVGA's XC Black Play runs very untroubled and impressively cool, taming the modest RTX 3060 GPU with ease. No complaints whatsoever. The blower-style coolers on the last-gen Radeon cards sure are warm and loud, though.

Adjacent paginate: Should you buy the GeForce RTX 3060?

Should you buy up the GeForce RTX 3060?

It's hard to recommend buying any graphics card right now. Overwhelming demand, supply woes, tariffs, scalpers, and cryptocurrency miners have sent availability plummeting and prices skyrocketing. Currently, a couple of weeks later launch, at that place is no stock available at any major etailer. Most custom models cost closer to $500 even before scalping begins. You canful't blame the manufacturers for hopping on the bonanza train, but if you wind instrument up seeing any RTX 3060 exit for $330 in the wild anytime about the publication escort of this review, get on it readily.

Nvidia's pitch this American Samoa a replacement for the popular GTX 1060, which cadaver the most favourite card on Steamer's Computer hardware Go over. The GeForce RTX 3060 would be a significant advance over the GTX 1060. That posting launched at $250 though. Request $330 for this upgrade is a big Leontyne Price increment even with beam of light tracing and DLSS capabilities added. Back in the day, the GTX 1060 could besides gaming 1080p games without compromise, with the ability to play games at 1440p with any visual tweaks—just the likes of the RTX 3060.

Paying $500-plus for a 60-class GeForce GPU is just madness. Adam pelt some games over GeForce Directly instead, if you have a redeeming Internet connection, and wait out this bloodbath. Nvidia's cloud gaming inspection and repair hooks into existing PC platforms so you preceptor't need to buy inexperient games for it.

Ignoring the terrible modern GPU commercialise, if we evaluate the RTX 3060 based connected MSRP only, it's an uninspiring upgrade to the $350 RTX 2060. Its public presentation lands information technology in close to the same soil as the $400 RTX 2060 Super or $500 RTX 2070. In many games, AMD's older Radeon RX 5700 XT beats it, while the non-Crosstalk 5700 hangs tough in several titles (though information technology's also smashed in others). Those launched at $400 and $350, respectively.

After seeing how far the pricier RTX 30-serial pushed performance past their predecessors, the RTX 3060's results are a bit deflating. We would've liked it much more at $300 or level less, but presented nowadays's surging market, information technology makes sense for Nvidia to price the GPU higher to long pillow its own bank account. At MSRP, the $400 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a much Sir Thomas More powerful, much Thomas More powerful alternative.

The RTX 3060 is fine though, as we aforesaid at the beginning. IT's ok. Merely unlike the other RTX 30-serial offerings, it's nothing special. If you need a graphics card for 60-fps gaming at 1080p Ultra quality, this wish scratch that spoil, and the RTX 3060 buns advertise even higher brush up rates in some games. You can also dabble in 1440p gaming if you assume't mind bumping the visual settings down a trifle in modern titles. With an ample (read: overkill) 12GB of VRAM onboard, you'll ne'er have got to worry about running out of memory. That's great! And Nvidia's DLSS and latency-reducing Reflex technologies remain a big difference maker in games that patronise it.

Turning our attention to this taxonomic group graphics card, the EVGA XC Black Gaming lacks fancy extras equal a backplate, RGB kindling, and a secondary BIOS, just it should fit into almost whatsoever system–and IT runs cool and tranquility. Thither's no need to spend up for a more expensive model simply for better cooling performance. The price is certainly right for today's raving GPU commercialize—if you can find one.

Don't expect many of the service line-cost RTX 3060 models to be made. Most vendors will focus their attentions connected far pricier hot-rodded models for which they can saddle significantly more, even ahead scalpers swoop in.

Don't spend $500 or many on a graphics card like this. I wouldn't in person spend $400 on an RTX 3060—even a sumptuous mellow-goal model with every Alexander Bell and whistle you stool regard as. They're already being sold for $600 or more connected resale sites. The GeForce RTX 3060 is precisely a good-enough graphics card in a clock where even okay, smooth GPUs liquidize instantly for staggering amounts.

Pay up if you must, merely pose happening the sidelines for now if you can.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/394228/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-review.html

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