Review of the RTX 3060: solid performance, but at what price?

It is an awkward time to review a video card. I spent the last week testing a GeForce RTX 3060, the latest GPU from Nvidia, but I was only able to do that because the company sent a test unit to Polygon. If you are the general public, it is almost impossible to get a video card from Nvidia or AMD. This is the result of a confluence of factors, mainly a worldwide scarcity of semiconductors (which is limiting production capacity) and the skyrocketing values ​​of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (which is fueling the increased demand for GPUs, since they can used for mining operations).

All of this is relevant to an analysis of the RTX 3060 specifically because it is the cheapest offering in the Nvidia 30 series GPU line, with an MSRP starting at $ 329.99. This is the price of the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming, the card that Nvidia sent us because the company is not producing a Founders Edition for the RTX 3060.

Price-conscious players looking for a new graphics card can now be forced to buy something at an inflated price and / or get a different GPU than the RTX 3060. Considered in a vacuum, the RTX 3060 is a very good mid-range graphics card for people looking to play at resolutions up to 1440p. But we don’t live in a vacuum, so the best I can do is evaluate the GPU itself and provide some context about the current market.

Nvidia launched the RTX 3060 in late February, about three months after the launch of the RTX 3060 Ti. This card, which starts at $ 399, offers a good margin of maneuver at 1440p, although it is not designed for 4K gaming. . The RTX 3060, on the other hand, is a 1080p-oriented GPU that can also handle 1440p. This made me particularly interested in trying it out, because my desktop is connected to a 1080p screen – well, a 1920×1200 60 Hz monitor, to be more precise – and because its CPU, an Intel Core i5-7500 quad-core 3.4 GHz, it is an older chip that barely meets the minimum specifications for some of the newer games.

The RTX 3060 I am testing is a standard two-slot GPU with a pair of large fans that keep the card reasonably quiet. I noticed that there is an increase in noise compared to my existing Gigabyte RTX 2060 Super – when it starts, the RTX 3060 is a little bit louder – but it makes sense, since the Gigabyte GPU has three fans.

The EVGA card’s port array comprises a single line of three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and an HDMI 2.1 output. (I can’t test any HDMI 2.1 feature because I don’t have a screen that supports it.) And, unlike the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti, the Founders Edition which features Nvidia’s new 12-pin power connector, the RTX 3060 can survive with a traditional eight-pin connection. It consumes 170 W of power, with a recommended power supply of 550 W.

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

Now, this may not be surprising for a GPU that is the cheapest lightning-capable card, since Nvidia cut the price of the RTX 2060 to $ 299 in January 2020. And since I’m coming from an RTX 2060 Super – which is only a generation old, having been released in July 2019 – I didn’t expect to be surprised by the RTX 3060. In fact, its performance will depend a lot on the specifications of your own PC and, of course, the games you are playing. Playing.

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

I once turned on lightning tracking (which Young blood only supports reflexes), the improvement was minor, but still impressive. In Riverside, the average frame rate was 88 fps with the RTX 2060 Super to 109 fps with the RTX 3060, an increase of almost 24%; in Lab X, the number went from 75 fps to 91.5 fps, a jump of 22%. And I managed to recover some frames, maintaining the image quality, enabling Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology.

I also got good results with the RTX 3060 in To control, an excellent showcase for ray tracing. I’ve played the entire game using my RTX 2060 Super, with all five lightning tracking effects at maximum. In stress tests like the corridor above the NSC Control Room and intense battles in the Central Research lobby, the frame rate generally fluctuated in the range of 45-60 fps. Of course, this was with DLSS enabled, which renders the game at an internal resolution of 1280×800 – two thirds of my monitor’s native 1920×1200. Playing with the RTX 3060 using these same settings, the frame rate was normally in a more playable range of 60-75 fps, with rare drops in the mid 50s.

However, my flaky PC and I had a very different experience with Hitman 3, a game whose complex underlying simulation depends a lot on the power of the CPU. If you’re stuck with a 4-year-old CPU that isn’t even a Core i7 chip, like me, write down my results.

At 1920×1200 at maximum settings, swapping my RTX 2060 Super for RTX 3060 resulted in less than 10% frame rate improvements for the game’s two static benchmarks – from 99.92 fps to 106.92 fps in Dubai (7.01 %), and from 103.85 fps to 112.99 fps on Dartmoor (8.8%). When I turned on the super-sampling at 1.3x (to approximate running the game in a resolution around 1440p) and 2x (to approximate 4K), the gains were even smaller. With 2x oversampling enabled, the average frame rate on Dartmoor increased from just 42.68 fps to 43.87 fps – just 2.79%.

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

But people with 1440p monitors would be better served by the RTX 3060 Ti (that is, if they can find it in stock). While it is possible that we could start to see a series of games that would take full advantage of the RTD 3060’s 12 GB of GDDR6 video memory, it is difficult to imagine the 8 GB of RAM on the other Nvidia 30 series cards (except for the RTX 3090) becoming a significant bottleneck soon. 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% and 35% faster” than the RTX 3060 when playing at maximum 1440p settings . For $ 399 – a premium of $ 70, or 21.2%, on the RTR 3060’s MSRP – you’ll simply get a better value.

Of course, as I noted, it all depends on whether we are actually able to find any of these graphics cards (and at their retail prices, to boot). If you have the opportunity to buy an RTX 3060 and it makes sense for your particular situation – the screen resolution, the age of the GPU you would be replacing and your budget – it is a solid card that should provide a noticeable update. You will have to make that call for yourself.

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