Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Review

The GeForce RTX 3060 Nvidia long awaited premium mid range Ampere architecture GPU. This, is the one that's destined to top Steam Charts for the most popular gaming card on the planet for at least as long as it's forefather or fore grandfather the GTX 1060 did. 

But that assumes a couple of things doesn't it? One, that it's actually any good. And of course number two, that Nvidia can make enough of them.  It's hard to believe that the GTX 1060 is nearly five years old at this point. That's how long it's been since anything has even come close to the level of bang for the buck that this card represented. It beat out the contemporary Polaris-based RX 480 and AMD's hey at least you tried RX 580 Refresh, then Nvidia themselves tried to make the magic lightening strike again. First with the RTX 2060, then with their GTX 1600 series. I mean those are both good products, don't get me wrong, but the 1060 is still the top dog on Steam's Hardware Survey, so it's clear that mid range gamers were hungry for something better. That's why so much is riding on the RTX 3060. Nvidia is explicitly targeting you, the nearly 10% of you out there who are watching this on a 1060. This is going to be the GPU to finally topple it. At least that's what I would say, if the replacement were coming in at the same price point while the $329 US price tag does make sense next to the GTX 1060 6 GB Founders Edition at $299 at least after we adjusted for inflation there is no Founder's Edition this time around just a reference design. So you are definitely still paying an RTX tax. This may give AMD and in with their tease there of what is almost certainly there RX 6700 series. Get subscribed by the way so you don't miss our coverage of those cards when they launch. Unlike the RTX 3060 TI which does have a Founder's Edition, the RTX 3060 comes with 50% more GDDR6 memory but that's constrained to a slower 192 bit bus as for it's faster clocked CUDA Cores. Well they're faster clocks, but they've been cut to just shy of threequarters of its TI sibling. Compared to the GTX 1060 though, the RTX 3060 gets all the goodies that come with Nvidia's latest Ampere architecture like Ray Tracing, HDMI 2.1 for up to 4K 120 Hertz displays, Nvidia broadcast and the Turing NVENC engine that's just so good for streaming. That means that as long as performance is good the extra ask from Nvidia is likely to be more than worth it. We got this via very unconventional means. Starting the Shadow of the Tomb Raider then, it's no surprise that in traditional rasterization the GTX 1060 falls way behind the new RTX 3060. What is a little surprising? And this could be good news for you. Is that the RTX 2060 SUPER come so close. So if you did shell out for last generation, well you shouldn't feel too compelled to upgrade here. Back to those who didn't though, well this might finally be it the card that makes RTX mainstream. I mean check this out, with RTX on the 3060 managers higher performance numbers at 1080p than the GTX 1060 gets with RTX off. As for the 1060 with RTX on, well some people tried it but it crashed out due to a display driver reset that nearly took the rest of the PC with it. F1 2020 sees the 3060 pulling further ahead of the RTX 2060 SUPER with a total improvement entering the high 20% before dipping back down to the low 10s in Forza Horizon 4, as for the GTX 1060 well, it struggled to maintain a frame rate much higher than 60. Then there's Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Youngblood is a highly optimized Vulkan title and it shows in how much of a performance chasm there is between the GTX 1060 and the rest of the pack. And the 1060 straight up refuses to even run Vulkan Ray Tracing since non RTX cards rely on the Direct X 12 Fallback Layer. As for Microsoft Flight Simulator it's basically unplayable on the GTX 1060 unless you're willing to reduce the graphics quality. The CUDA Grass for Pascal though really is CSGO performance. And you might look at these numbers and think what's the problem? But Nvidia's Frames Win Games, motto isn't for nothing. The faster a frame can be rendered and pushed to your display. The more up-to-date the information that hits your eyes is going to be. And for a game like CSGO especially in a competitive match that makes a big difference. So the rule of thumb then is that you want minimum frame rates that are no lower than double the refresh rate of your display. That gives you optimal frame pacing and input leg. So on a 60 Hertz display, you're good to go with this, don't even worry about it,187 FPS minimum, no problem. As soon as you upgrade to a 120 Hertz display though, which is surprisingly affordable you are not gonna be doing so hot. If you're cold, by the way try this sweater fromittstore.com, it's very warm. Moving on to productivity, the GTX 1060 has an obvious disadvantage going in lacking both the Turing and Ampere generational performance improvements. Even knowing that though it is staggering to see just how badly it gets beaten here. The RTX 3060 manages to significantly outpace the last gen RTX 2060 SUPER, let alone the geriatric 1060 where that card it's rendering performance can charitably be described as adequate if you don't value your time.  SPEC view perf meanwhile looks like it's largely a tie between the RTX 3060 and the 2060 SUPER with a few wins here and there but nothing mind blowing. It's worth mentioning that the RTX 3060 narrower 192 bit memory bus puts it at a disadvantage in some of these tests but it still keeps well ahead of the 1060 thanks to its higher speed GDDR6 and everything else it's better about it. As for our particular variant we were supposed to have an EVGA card, then a Asus one, then a different EVGA one, we ended up with a MSI VENTUS 2X. It's got a pretty modest cool compared to some of the top end variants of RTX 3060 but even this card peaked at temperatures of about 70 degrees throughout SPEC view perf, with a very similar cooling and noise profile to not only the RTX 3060 TI but also the 2060 SUPER and even GTX 1060. And all of this was while maintaining roughly our cards maximum boost clock of 1.9 gigahertz, which suggests that this GPU has significant thermal headroom and may be able to be pushed much harder with the right board and cooler. With an 8-Pin PCI Express power connector. It goes without saying that the RTX 3060 draws more power than the 6-Pin GTX 1060, and this is reflected in its official power rating. At peak, it drew a cool 40-watts less though than the more powerful RTX 3060 TI with a peak of just over 160-watts. That's good, but what's more impressive is that it drew less power than even the RTX 2060 SUPER which peaked it over 175-watts. While the older GTX 1060 certainly did manage lower power consumption on average though, it actually manages to spike to around the same maximum. So RTX 3060 is looking pretty darn good as far as thermals and power consumption. I mean overall there's very little to complain about in terms of performance. It's just that, and this at risk of beating a dead horse here. Availability may be a different issue. Now it is possible that these will be more widely available than previous RTX 30 series launches but while Nvidia seemed confident that there would be lots of supply, a couple of retailers that we've spoken to locally have some doubts about that, at least out of the gate. So if that's true, today could be yet another payday for filthy scalpers. We can only hope then that supply is good enough that demand falls and those scalpers end up with a whole bunch of extra cards they have to liquidate into actual gamers as quickly as possible. Now you might've noticed that one thing we didn't talk about today is mining. And the reason for that is that we've set our peace on it already. And we only want to evaluate this product from a gaming perspective on its merits for gamers not the political decisions that Nvidia makes. So whatever we said before, it's important for you guys to know we don't hate Nvidia and we definitely don't hate this product. It's just that when any company makes a boneheaded decision Apple, Dell, Intel, AMD doesn't matter who it's our job to call them out. And then by the same token, it's our job to praise them when they get something right. And they got a lot right with the RTX 3060.

Till then BYE :)