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

This is a strange time to review a graphics card. I’ve been testing a GeForce RTX 3060, Nvidia’s latest GPU, for the past week or so, but I could only do that because the company sent a review unit to Polygon. If you are a member of the public, it is almost impossible to get hold of a graphics card from Nvidia or AMD. This is the result of a confluence of factors, in particular a global shortage of semiconductors (which limits production capacity) and the emerging values ​​of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (which increases the demand for GPUs as it can be used for mining operations).

This is all relevant for a review of the RTX 3060, specifically because it is the cheapest offering in Nvidia’s 30 series GPUs, with an MSRP starting at $ 329.99. This happens to be the price of the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming, the card that Nvidia sent us because the company does not manufacture a Founders Edition for the RTX 3060.

Price-conscious gamers who are currently looking for a new graphics card may be forced to buy something at a high price and / or buy a different GPU than the RTX 3060. The RTX 3060 is considered in a vacuum as a very good graphics card for people. looking for games at resolutions up to 1440p. But we do not live in a vacuum, so the best I can do is evaluate the GPU myself and give some context about the current market.

Nvidia released the RTX 3060 in late February, about three months after the launch of the RTX 3060 Ti. The card, which starts at $ 399, offers a large headroom at 1440p, although it is not designed for 4K games. The RTX 3060, on the other hand, is a 1080p-oriented GPU at its core that can also handle 1440p. I was particularly interested in trying it out, because my desktop is connected to a 1080p screen – well, a 1920×1200 60 Hz monitor, to be exact – and because the CPU, a quad-core 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5-7500, 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 few large fans that keep the card fairly quiet. I noticed that there is a noise increase in my existing Gigabyte RTX 2060 Super – if it’s running, the RTX 3060 is a bit louder – but that’s logical, since the Gigabyte GPU has three fans.

The EVGA card’s port range consists of a single line of three DisplayPort 1.4 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port. (I can not test any HDMI 2.1 features, because I do not have a screen that supports it.) And unlike the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti, on which the Founders Edition depends on Nvidia’s new 12-pin power connector , the RTX 3060 comes with one traditional eight-pin connector. It draws 170 W of power, with a recommended power source of 550 W.

In terms of how powerful the RTX 3060 is, it’s not a slam dunk upgrade unless you’re from something as old as a GTX 10 series card.

This is perhaps not surprising for a GPU which is the cheapest card for ray detection as Nvidia lowered the price of the RTX 2060 to $ 299 in January 2020. And because I came from an RTX 2060 Super – which is only one generation old, which was released in July 2019 – I did not expect to be blown away from the RTX 3060. Its performance will indeed depend a lot on the details of your own computer and of course the games you play.

The RTX 3060 can certainly offer significant advantages over the RTX 2060 Super (and of course GPUs that are even older). Try Wolfenstein: Youngblood at 1920×1200 at maximum settings, my average frame rate in both the Riverside and Lab X standards with the RTX 2060 Super jumped from about 124 frames per second to about 170 fps with the RTX 3060 – an increase of about 38%.

One time I turned on ray tracing (which Young blood supported only for reflections), the improvement was smaller, yet impressive. In Riverside, the average frame rate went 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 rose from 75 fps to 91.5 fps, a jump of 22%. And I was able to screen back a few frames while maintaining image quality by enabling Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology.

I also got good results with the RTX 3060 in Control, an excellent display window for beam tracking. I previously played the entire game with my RTX 2060 Super, with all five effects for ray detection up to high. In stress tests such as the corridor above the NSC control room and intense fighting in the central research atrium, the frame rate usually moved in the 45-60 fps range. Of course, it was enabled with DLSS, delivering the game with an internal resolution of 1280×800 – two thirds of my monitor’s original 1920×1200. If you play with the RTX 3060 with the same settings, the frame rate was typically in a more playable range of 60-75 fps, with rare drops in the mid 50’s.

However, me and my crusty PC had a very different experience Hitman 3, a game whose intricate underlying simulation is heavily dependent on CPU power. If you get stuck with a 4-year-old CPU that is not even a Core i7 chip, like me, take note of my results.

If I swapped my RTX 2060 Super for the RTX 3060 at 1920×1200 at maximum settings, the rate improved by less than 10% for the two static metrics of the game – from 99.92 fps to 106.92 fps in Dubai (7 .01%) and from 103.85 fps to 112.99 rps in Dartmoor (8.8%). When I turned on the supersampling of 1.3x (to run the game around 1440p) and 2x (to approach 4K), the gain became even slimmer. With 2x supersampling enabled, the average frame rate in Dartmoor increased from 42.68 fps to 43.87 fps – only 2.79%.

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

But people with 1440p monitors would rather be served by the RTX 3060 Ti (if they can find it in stock, that is). While we may see a series of games that will utilize most of the 12 GB of GDDR6 memory of the RTX 3060, it’s hard to imagine the 8 GB of RAM on Nvidia’s other 30 series cards (except for the RTX 3090) will soon become a significant bottleneck. And in his review of the RTX 3060 at The Verge, my colleague Sean Hollister found that the RTX 3060 Ti “almost always” performed “between 15 percent and 35 percent faster” than the RTX 3060 when playing at maximum settings at 1440p . At $ 399 – a $ 70 or 21.2% premium – above the RTX 3060’s MSRP, you simply get better value.

Of course, as I mentioned, it depends on you being able to find one of these graphics cards (and at their retail prices, to begin with). If you get the opportunity to buy an RTX 3060 and it makes sense for your specific situation – your screen resolution, the age of the GPU you are going to replace and your budget – this is a solid card that should offer a noticeable upgrade . You need to make the call for yourself.

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