Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 GAMING OC 12GB Graphics Card

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The margin remains much the same at 1440p, where the 3060 was 14% slower than the 3060 Ti and 15% slower than the 5700 XT. It does match the vanilla RX 5700 and that means it's just a few frames faster than the RTX 2070. The RTX 4060 is the designated successor to the RTX 3060, at least if you go by name alone.Looking at the raw data alone, the RTX 4060 is the better card of the two, but not by every measure. The AD107 GPU powering the RTX 4060 is significantly smaller and uses much less power than the RTX 3060. It's got a better feature set that includes DLSS 3 with Frame Generation capability. Together, they give the RTX 4060 a healthy FPS boost in games that support the tech. Leaving that aside, the RTX 4060 still outperforms the RTX 3060 by a fair enough margin, and considering the relative launch prices of the two, the RTX 4060 is absolutely the better card of the two. Prior to the launch of the RTX 40-series, it would have been a safe bet to assume the RTX 4060 would handily beat out a card just one tier higher from the previous generation. Sadly it does not. The RTX 3060 Ti holds a relatively small, but still notable lead at all resolutions. In fact, being unable to beat the RTX 3060 Ti may be the RTX 4060's headline weakness. Which one should you choose? That's tough. I'd go for the RX 6700 XT but only if you can snag it for a great price. The extra memory, bandwidth and shading power give it the edge, particularly at 1440p. But then there's ray tracing, DLSS 3 and Frame Generation. They can easily put the RTX 4060 ahead of the RX 6700 XT.

When compared to the RTX 2060, the 3060 was 13% faster when comparing native performance or DLSS-enabled performance. However, with ray tracing enabled the RTX 3060 was much more efficient, delivering up to 26% better performance. The latest in a long line of successful racing games, F1 2020is a gem to test, supplying a wide array of both graphical and benchmarking options, making it a much more reliable (and fun) option that the Forzaseries. It’s built on the latest version of Codemasters’ buttery-smooth Ego game engine, complete with support for DX12 and Nvidia’s DLSS technology. We test two laps on the Australia course, with clear skies on and DLSS off. Brad Chacos/IDG Shadow of the Tomb Raider The RTX 4060 retains its key advantages, including a massive power efficiency lead. The RX 6700 XT's nearly 100% higher TDP counts against it. The RTX 4060 also has a superior feature set including DLSS 3 and Frame Generation which - if supported by the game, will vault it ahead of the RX 6700 XT. The GeForce RTX™ 3060 is powered by Ampere—NVIDIA’s 2nd gen RTX architecture. Built with enhanced Ray Tracing Cores and Tensor Cores, new streaming multiprocessors, and high-speed G6 memory up to 8GB, giving you the power you need to rip through the most demanding games.And you really can’t talk about Nvidia Ampere without talking about ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Both of these technologies are supported by the RTX 3060, though the smaller GPU means that there is less dedicated hardware for RT and DLSS workloads. An 18% lead at 1080p and 16% lead at 1440p aren't bad, but we'd expect more from a generational upgrade. The RTX 4060 loses a lot of its power efficiency advantage compared to the RTX 4060 Ti, which comes in at an impressive 160W. Though the RTX 4060's 115W still gives it a performance per watt lead, it's not large enough to really matter in the face of the RTX 4060 Ti's overall performance advantage.

The RTX 3060 like most modern GPUs performs well in Death Stranding at 1080p, hitting 129 fps on average to match the GTX 1080 Ti and RX 5700. That said it's 11% slower than the 5700 XT and 19% slower than the 3060 Ti. It’s powered by a single 8-pin PCIe connector, which means you don’t need to worry about an unsightly 12-pin adapter. Again, another benefit for users that want to build in a smaller case. I/O is also incredibly simple, with three DisplayPorts and one HDMI 2.1 port. In Watch Dogs Legion at 1440p, the RTX 3060 was good for just 62 fps on average at the native resolution. Enabling quality DLSS boosted the frame rate by 30% to 81 fps, a very nice performance upgrade. Which of course, brings us to the present situation. At the moment, Nvidia has no incentive to make the RTX 3060 a killer value. Nvidia can still present this price point and sell as many cards as they can produce, evidenced by the fact that it sold out instantly. Even if the market returned to normalcy later in 2021 – something we're not expecting – Nvidia could simply refresh the 3060 series with a Super variant and adjust pricing to whatever is appropriate then. The biggest change in Ampere is in the Streaming Multiprocessor’s (SM) datapath. Where previous generations had separate pipelines for Integer and Floating Point 32 (FP32) workloads, Nvidia has effectively doubled the amount of cores that can handle standard FP32 work – which just happens to be incredibly important for gaming performance. Because of this, the amount of CUDA cores per SM has doubled to 128, rather than the 64 found in something like card from our Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 review.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Graphics Cards

The RTX 4060 holds a power efficiency advantage, and a substantial one at that. The RTX 4060's efficiency is arguably the highlight of the card, while in the case of the RX 7600 it's a lowlight. A clear win to the RTX 4060 here. The graphics card doesn’t perform especially well at 1440p, and at 1080p many games aren’t going to push into requiring 12GB of VRAM for a long time to come. There are some titles that will utilize more than 8GB, but you don’t really gain a noticeable boost in performance if you don’t have that. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 also comes equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 192-bit bus. And, well, it’s a bit odd that this graphics card has such a gargantuan amount of memory available to it. For testing we're still using the Ryzen 9 3950X test system as we progress on updating everything to be tested under the R9 5950X. Expect all that data once we get through this latest round of product releases. The test system is configured with 32GB of dual-rank, dual-channel DDR4-3200 CL14 memory.

Shadow of the Tomb Raiderconcludes the reboot trilogy, and it’s still utterly gorgeous a couple of years after its debut. Square Enix optimized this game for DX12 and recommends DX11 only if you’re using older hardware or Windows 7, so we test with DX12. Shadow of the Tomb Raideruses an enhanced version of the Foundation engine that also powered Rise of the Tomb Raiderand includes optional real-time ray tracing and DLSS features. Brad Chacos/IDG Rainbow Six Siege The margins are fairly similar at 1440p, at least relative to other GeForce GPUs such as the RTX 2070. The RTX 3060 manages to match the 5700 XT here, so that's certainly an improvement over what we saw at 1080p, but it's still 21% slower than the 3060 Ti. Nvidia is trying to combat the appeal to cryptocurrency miners with the RTX 3060, though, with a combination of hardware and software to cripple its hash rate. It remains to be seen whether or not this will help keep the price of the card low, but we hope it does. Once this card starts seeing its price rise closer to the RTX 3060 Ti, its value rapidly diminishes.Our benchmark suite is pretty taxing, with lots of ray traced titles represented. This should prove beneficial to the RTX 4060, but the A750's ray tracing performance is actually quite good. DLSS 3 is Nvidia's golden goose this generation, but Intel's XeSS is maturing nicely and if you play games that support it, it can be a tremendous value add. Here's a better look at graphics card power consumption using PCAT. We find that the RTX 3060 does consume 12% less power than the 3060 Ti, but given it was on average 22% slower, that's not a good result for power efficiency. It's a little more efficient than the 2060 Super, for example, consuming 6% more power for 17% more performance on average, not amazing but it's an improvement. Metro: Exodus uses ray tracing for global illumination. It also uses DLSS 1.0 and doesn’t support the upscaling feature at 1080p, so we’ve only included raw ray tracing performance on that chart. Brad Chacos/IDG Brad Chacos/IDG Resizable BAR lets the CPU tap fully into the GPU’s memory, offering performance gains in some scenarios.