Fast, affordable, high-performance, and exquisite gaming experience – Nvidia GeForce RX 3060 Ti ticks all the boxes. It provides you excellent value for money.
It is one of the fastest graphics cards available in the market today. At $399, it is now the highest-rated graphic card in the new lineup of graphics cards with Ampere technology. More importantly, it provides excellent performance comparable to, and in few instances, better than Super RTX 2080
With Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti you can also enjoy affordable especially if you want to play in ultra-mode when ray tracing is enabled at 1440p resolution. It may support 4K games with lower settings. Remember that this particular graphics card is meant to support 1440p resolution games.
You want to play the latest games with new and improved graphics right? Well, with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 now you can, along with an outstanding performance supporting not only 1080p but also 1440p.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 – Price and Availability in the Market
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was released on second of December, 2020. It has a price tag of $399, just like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super.
The RTX 3060 costs roughly the same as the Super RTX 2060, although its power is twice than the RTX 2080 Super, which costs $699 (about £ 560, $ 990). The card was an Ultra 1440p device, just like the Ti 3060, except it’s much cheaper now.
Features of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
Remember the Ampere architecture of the RTX 3080? The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has the same architecture as the RTX 3080. This might give you a rough idea about the functionality and performance of a mid-range graphics card.
This 8GB graphics card comes with GDDR6 memory as the RTX 3070, as well as 38-ampere Streaming Multiprocessors (SM). Although, thanks to changes from Turing to Streaming Multiprocessors, Nvidia now offers 128 Compute Unified Device Architecture cores, twice the 64 that was present in each Turing streaming multiprocessor.
This means that the RTX 3060 Ti now has 4864 CUDA cores compared to the 2076 Super RTX which came out with 2,176 cores.
The power consumption has increased. The cumulative visual power of the RTX 3060 Ti is 200W, compared to the 175Watts of Super RTX 2060. That’s enough, but not so much. To accommodate, you will need to update your electrical power supply provided, if you already have one, you are good to go.
Returning to Turing, each Streaming Multiprocessor had two data paths, one for Floating-Point (FP32) tasks and one for Integer tasks. With Ampere, Nvidia was able to engineer the streaming multiprocessor and hence, the RTX 3060 Ti, to make 1 of the data paths capable to do twice the work, which is why the number of compute unified device architecture cores per streaming multiprocessor with Ampere has effectively increased.
In addition to the CUDA cores, all streaming multiprocessor Tensor Cores support AI workloads such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and RT cores – the ray tracing core. Each Streaming Multiprocessor contains a total of 5 cores out of which four are the tensor ones and the remaining one is the ray-tracing core. It is important to note that each Streaming Multiprocessor has half as many Tensor Cores as Turing, but with double speed.
Moreover, we know that everyone was concerned about the ray tracing feature. Well, the RT core is responsible for that. The Ray Tracing core is responsible to minimize the huge computing load that ray tracing needs to generate frame rates that are playable at least.
When a ray of light is generated in the game engine, the streaming multiprocessor sends data to the heart of the Ray Tracing core, which calculates the location of the beam’s collision and notifies the streaming multiprocessor to return the image. Computationally speaking, this does not make the ray tracing feature free though, as you will notice a huge boost in the performance when and if you enable the ray tracing feature in Metro Exodus.
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if these RT cores were absent? Well, without these Ray Tracing cores, it would have turned into a good old slideshow because of the performance hit.
The Tensor Core, another type of core, is another piece of the puzzle that enables ray tracing features in PC games. With the help of the Tensor Core, the developers can now incorporate deep learning super-sampling in games. This increases performance by letting the Streaming Multiprocessor generate a scene at a resolution which is low and then have the Tensor Core intelligently scale the image to a resolution which is high using data from Nvidia’s Supercomputers.
You can add a large portion of the output voltage that RT generates for your desktop with DLSS, enabling you to enjoy the amazing image stabilization advantages of RT feature without, of course, loosing far too much value. In reality, ray-tracing would be of no worth without DLSS.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has many applications as well. E-sports competitors can benefit from the reflex of Nvidia, which reduces the latency of the system. RTX IO works with Microsoft Direct Storage to move data directly from your device store to VRAM, and Nvidia Broadcast lets you in reducing the noise caused in the background when playing videos.
The last one, in particular, has helped us and facilitated us greatly throughout home-based quarantine and the uncountable number of video calls that we all had to make from our homes during 2020. Meanwhile, some applications, such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, have similar features. If you have the preferred settings in place, it saves a large amount of time.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Design
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition is similar to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition in several ways. Even the size of both of the cards is the same. The number of fans is similar and the open wings that are present on the posterior to help release hot air from the GPU till it exits the case are also the same.
Wait, are you wondering what is the difference? The only difference is that the RTX 3070 has a light gray hue. Nevertheless, Nvidia is known to introduce the best and supreme graphics cards as of right now.
Furthermore, a plus point is that the fancy cooler works fittingly well too. During testing, we saw a maximum temperature of 72°C, which is roughly the same as the Super RTX 2060 but consumes energy that is 10% more.
Hence, it’s not just about blossoms and daylight. While the heat-sink itself is astounding, it recoils the graphical possessing unit board into place with a similar disadvantage. The RTX 3060 Ti explicitly utilizes a similar 12-pin power plug. The Nvidia bundle includes a connector that permits you to connect a solitary 8-pin PCIe link to a 12-pin port, however makes managing the cables a bit more complicated to deal with. Luckily, PSU makers have started manufacturing custom 12-pin PCIe links, so ideally, this issue will be addressed in due time.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 – Performance and Benchmarks
What we like about new mid-range graphics cards like the RTX 3060 Ti is that they bring the PC gaming performance baseline up, and are accessible and affordable for everyone. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has an edge over Super RTX 2060, just like the rest of the Ampere line graphics cards have outperformed its predecessors.
For example, in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the 4K performance target for DirectX 12 games, which most current games would use, the RTX 3060 Ti is 38% faster than the Super 2060. In the test of Port Royal, which effectively measures raw ray tracing, Nvidia’s latest GPU outperforms Turing counterpart by 39%.
Even more impressive is how the RTX 3060 Ti compares to the RTX 2080 Super. Nvidia claims that the RTX 3060 Ti is faster than the Super RTX 2080, although it is a bit stretchy. On the other hand, the RTX 3060 Ti runs at a similar speed as Super RTX 2080, which is also surprisingly impressive considering the price of this new card.
In the two pre-built benchmarks mentioned above, the RTX 3060 Ti is 7% faster in Time Spy Extreme and 0.5 percent faster in Port Royal.
The RTX 3060 Ti outperforms the competition in play. The Ti RTX 3060 hits 69 frames per second on Metro Exodus with no ray tracing and a default ultra resolution of 1440p, compared to 68fps on the Super RTX 2080, which is within the margin of error. But when it comes to ray tracing, the 3rd generation RT core spreads its wings with an eight percent performance lead.
In some games where we switched to Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, the graphics card showed its superiority in 1440p games, where only Red Dead Redemption 2 and Total War: Three Kingdoms in most settings gave a frame rate of fewer than 60 frames per second. Compared to the demand for these two games, the RTX 3060 Ti has a cutoff of 55fps and 59fps, respectively, which is quite impressive.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti brings game-changing 1440p value to the mid-range segment, and it should remain a go-to 1440p card for a long time, given that AMD and Nvidia have now set their sights on 4K as the next Flagship battleground.
When it comes to straight 1440p performance, the Ti RTX 3060 stands out in the industry in terms of performance and price. This graphics card is roughly the same price as the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, but it showed roughly 35% faster speed in our tests.
Assuming that there will be a stock of this card, after its release, which itself is a big challenge in 2020, we realize that the RTX 3060 Ti could be the best graphics card for most people. We’re sure AMD designed everything to complicate these recommendations, but at the time of writing, Team Red has nothing to compete with the sheer value perspective of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which indeed is a strange position for AMD to be in.
However, it will be fascinating to see whether this graphics card evolves over the next ten years or not. If so, then how? Graphics requirements have become even more demanding with the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. For the first time, the Ti RTX 3060 appears ready, but is it ready enough to handle the next wave of gaming? We’ll have to sit back and observe closely.
Meanwhile, anybody not looking for a mid-range graphics card to handle 1440p gaming would find something to enjoy. With that resolution, you’ll be able to easily adjust the settings to full and then forget about them. That’s something you haven’t been able to do in this price range before. What is the most enjoyable aspect? There’s enough performance headroom for 4K gaming – just don’t expect the smooth 60fps experience that RTX 3080 can offer.
Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series cards appear to offer excellent results once again. We believe the RTX 3060 Ti is a steal at $399, provided that this graphics card is ideally made for playing games at 1440p resolution settings.
The RTX 3060 Ti offers a high resolution of 1440p, ray tracing support, Nvidia DLSS technology, and several other features for gamers. If you want a higher value graphics card with 144p resolutions the RTX 3070 costs $499 or the AMD Radeon RX 6800 if you can afford to pay $579.
It would be interesting to see if AMD can afford to launch the product with a $399 price tag in this market. Mainly because its rival RTX 3070 (Radeon RX 6800) costs $579. We’d say it’s worth waiting to see what AMD will offer at this price to pro gamers.
Anyway, even if you love the RTX 3060 Ti, you probably won’t get it. The RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and even the newest cards from AMD are hard to find. However, it is nice to have more options to switch to a 1440p display.
Conclusion
Lastly, the question arises: should you buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or not? Well, we think it depends upon what your preference is.
If you agree to stick with 1080p, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is certainly capable of supporting entry-level 4K gaming, but it shines at 1080p and 1440p. For many years, the RTX 3060 Ti was able to deliver a high frame rate of 1080p. Moreover, if you don’t want to pay a lot of money, since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti costs just $ 399, you don’t need to break your bank to get a new graphics card.
The RTX 3060 Ti is the real champion at ray tracing, and you don’t have to worry about unplayable frame rates at 1080p or even 1440p when DLSS is enabled. You should go for it.
But, if you want to play games in full 4K resolution, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti supports 4K with low resolution. Therefore, to play your favorite games in 4K resolution, it is better to opt for more capable graphics cards like RTX 3070 or RTX 3080.