Review of Nvidia RTX 3060: a great $ 329 GPU, but humble among the 3000 series

Last year of graphics card analysis was an exercise in dramatic asterisks, and for good reason. Nvidia and AMD have seen fit to ensure that members of the press have access to new graphics cards before their retail launches, which put us in a comfortable position to praise each of their next-generation offerings: good prices, tons of power.

Then, we see our comment sections explode with dissatisfied customers wondering how the hell to actually buy them. Since then, I have softened my melody in these pre-release previews.

I tell you all of this in advance about the Nvidia RTX 3060, which will go on sale today, February 25th (at 12pm ET, if you are interested in getting into the sales fray on the first day) because it is the first Nvidia GPU that I tested in a little while to make my cautious posture easier. The company is in shambles with its RTX 3000 series of cards in terms of absolute value to the consumer, particularly in comparison to equivalent previous generation cards (the $ 1,499 RTX 3090 despite), but the $ 329 RTX 3060 (not should be confused with December 3060 Ti) does not have the same weight. It’s a good 1080p card with 1440p of space for flexibility, but it’s not the next generation leap in its Nvidia price category that we’ve gotten used to.

In addition, unlike other modern Nvidia cards, this one lacks a particular backup reason to invest so much: crypto mining potential. (And this is intentional on Nvidia’s part.)

I hope your dish is better than mine

Before today’s review, Nvidia provided Ars Technica with an EVGA version of the RTX 3060, as this model will not be labeled with the Nvidia “Founders Edition” label (the first for any mainline RTX card). This 3060 variant keeps things simple in terms of construction, with two traditional fans mounted on the bottom and no “intermediate” fan construction found on Nvidia FEs, and is not advertised with any particular supercharged cooling options. Despite the lack of a smart fan construction, this model works cool and quiet with standard watches, never exceeding 65 ° C at full load.

Unfortunately for my test equipment, however, I had to take the unusual step of unscrewing the EVGA mounting plate so that it would not block my ability to insert the GPU into my case. In my anecdotal case, this was the first time I had to do this with a GPU that I analyzed or tested in my seven years at Ars (although, I recognize, it was mainly with Nvidia and AMD stock models, unlike for a wide range of OEMs).

Fortunately, I was still able to steadily position the EVGA GPU on my machine for testing purposes, at which point I started comparing it to the closest performing GPU I had: the RTX 2060 Super, launched in July 2019 for $ 399. This model was a much needed upgrade to the warm RTX 2060 and arrived as a good enough option for players who wanted robust 1080p performance across the board, along with many 1440p options and a reasonable way to immerse yourself in the worlds of lightning tracking and deep learning super-sampling (DLSS) owned by Nvidia.

In my tests, I found that the “cheapest $ 70” GPU (priced in a magic market without a scalper) usually fell neck and neck with the July 2019 card, instead of blowing up the old model. This seems to boil down to the giving and receiving nature of the two-card specification tables. The RTX 3060 has more than 150 percent of the 2060 Super CUDA cores, along with 150 percent of the GDDR6 VRAM and a slight advantage in the main watches. But its VRAM is definitely not the same type, downgraded from a 256-bit bus to a 192-bit bus with lower memory bandwidth. In addition, comparing the proprietary “RTX” potential of each board counting tensor cores and RT cores is tricky, since the RTX 3060 has fewer cores than the RTX 2060 Super in both counts, although “younger” generations of each a.

All of the above benchmarks were conducted on my standard Ars test equipment, which features an i7-8700K CPU (overclocked to 4.6 GHz), 32 GB DDR4-3000 RAM and a mix of a PCI-e 3.0 NVMe drive and SSDs pattern.

My first question came when I saw the RTX 2060 Super beat the RTX 3060 in a variety of 3DMark benchmarks. The older board had a performance lead of up to 6.5 percent in a direct GPU muscle test (“Fire Strike Ultra”), and still outperformed the newer board, albeit marginally, in a lightning stroke confrontation 3DMark face to face.

With that knowledge in hand, I took an Nvidia benchmark chart provided to members of the press, which aligned with most of my other tests – albeit with results that were slightly more beneficial for the newer RTX 3060 than mine. Where Nvidia found this The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (ray tracing disabled) were “dead” between the 3060 and the 2060 Super as tested in 4K resolution, my repeatable personal benchmarks gave the older card an advantage. Grand Theft Auto V, which runs 2.9 percent faster on the 2060 Super in 4K, does not appear in the benchmark table provided by Nvidia.

But the rest of my tests showed that the RTX 3060 is generally the best in gaming performance. Many of the best results came when a given benchmark included ray-tracing effects, but even as a pure, traditional raster card, it used to have a notable 9% advantage in non-RT tests.