Nvidia’s new RTX 3060 graphics card is here, but how does it compare against the RTX 2060
from last generation, or going back even further to the popular GTX 1060?
I’ve compared all 3 in 12 games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions to show you what
the differences are.
The 1060 and 2060 both have 6 gigs of memory, though the 2060’s is faster.
The 3060 has double the memory capacity at 12 gig while also having faster memory than
the 2060.
The 3060 has more CUDA cores than the others, but interestingly less RT cores than the older
2060, though the 3060s are 2nd gen so we’ll see if this matters when testing some games
with ray tracing.
The 1060 launched almost 5 years ago now, but they’re also easier to pick up second
hand and of course cheaper than the MSRP listed here.
This is the system that I’m using to test all three GPUs in, so overclocked 10900K and
32 gigs of memory are the key specs.
It’s also worth noting the BIOS on my Z490 board was updated so the 3060 was running
with resizable BAR enabled, this is not currently supported by the 10 or 20 series cards.
Alright so with all of that in mind, let’s first have a look at how these 3 graphics
cards compare in 12 different games at 3 resolutions.
We’ll also take a look at power draw, content creator workloads, pricing and availability
or lack thereof afterwards.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested using the games benchmark.
I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom, 1440p results in the middle, and 4K up the
top.
We can quickly see that both the 2060 and 3060 are offering nice gains when compared
to the older 1060, however the gap between the 2060 and 3060 is smaller comparatively.
At 1080p high settings the 3060 was reaching 24% higher average FPS compared to the 2060,
while the 3060 had a massive 133% lead over the 1060, the biggest out of all 12 games
at this resolution.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little China with the street kid life path.
These results are with ray tracing off, we’ll look at ray tracing and DLSS in the next graph.
This time the differences between the 2060 and 3060 were even smaller.
The 3060 was 13% faster than the 2060 at 1080p and 1440p, then 19% ahead at 4K, granted with
these frame rates you’d want to lower the settings.
Here’s how things look with the RT Medium preset in use with DLSS set to quality.
I don’t have results from the GTX 1060 here, as it doesn’t have ray tracing hardware
it’s not able to run.
The differences between the 2060 and 3060 were now much larger, the 3060 was 39% ahead
at 1080p and 65% at 1440p, the biggest gap between these two GPUs out of the 12 games
tested.
So it looks like there might be some nice gains in terms of ray tracing with the 3060
over the 2060.
Let’s check out another title with ray tracing support and see if that’s the case.
Like Cyberpunk, Control was tested with and without ray tracing, and we’ll start with
ray tracing off results.
I’ve found this game to be heavy on the GPU, and that’s especially the case given
I’m testing with max settings here.
Both the 2060 and 3060 were far ahead of the 1060 here.
At 1080p the 3060 was 129% higher than the 1060 in average FPS, but it only had a 19%
lead when compared to the 2060.
Based on this it would appear that the 2060 was an awesome upgrade over the 1060, but
the 3060, not so much of an upgrade compared to the 2060 before it, and I’m not even
considering the 2060 Super which would sit in between them.
Here’s how things change by enabling both ray tracing and DLSS.
Again no results for the 1060 as it doesn’t have ray tracing support.
The 3060 is actually performing better at all three resolutions with ray tracing and
DLSS compared to just running at stock which is kind of impressive stuff.
The results from the 2060 are more mixed, some resolutions saw gains while others lowered
back a bit, ultimately resulting in the 3060 being 22% ahead of the 2060 at 1080p and 1440p,
so a slightly larger gap compared to the 19% difference we saw just before with ray tracing
off.
It’s worth noting that the differences between these two GPUs at 4K was the largest seen
out of all 12 titles.
It’s hard to say if this is the new ray tracing hardware helping, or it could just
be the fact that the 3060 has double the VRAM capacity.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was tested in the Sydney landing challenge.
The 3060 at 1080p was the only option that could deliver more than 60 FPS, granted you
could of course run with lower settings should you want to prefer a smoother experience.
Higher settings are generally more GPU dependent which is important for a comparison like this.
The 3060 was reaching more than twice the average FPS of the 1060 at 1440p, a big improvement,
while the 3060 was only 22% ahead of the 2060 in this same test.
Even the 1% lows of the 2060 were beating the averages of the 1060.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was tested with the game's benchmark.
Again the 1% lows from the 2060 were ahead of even the average FPS of the 1060.
The new 3060 was only able to do this to the 2060 at 4K, where average FPS was 48% higher.
The difference was smaller at lower resolutions though, with the 3060 23% ahead of the 2060
at 1440p and 18% ahead at 1080p.
Watch Dogs Legion was also tested with the games benchmark.
1080p on the 3060 was the only configuration that could surpass 60 average FPS with the
highest ultra setting preset.
This time the 1% lows from the 3060 were all ahead of the average FPS of the 2060 at all
resolutions, there’s an above average difference when compared to the other 11 games tested
here with the 3060 offering a nice boost compared to the 2060.
Let’s see if there are any big differences for esports titles.
Fortnite was tested using the replay feature with the exact same replay used for all three
graphics cards.
This was another where the 1% lows from the 3060 could surpass even the average FPS of
the 2060.
The 3060 was able to offer more than two times higher average frame rate when compared to
the 1060 at all three resolutions.
While that sounds nice, and it is, as you’ll see later though this was actually the case
with most games.
CS:GO was tested with the ulletical FPS benchmark, and typically depends more on CPU performance
than GPU.
The 1% low difference between the 2060 and 3060 was minor at all three resolutions.
The difference to average FPS was also small too, this game saw the smallest improvements
when comparing all 12 titles that I’ve tested.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the games benchmark using Vulkan.
This was another where the 3060 was able to produce more than two times the frames when
compared to the older 1060.
There’s a fair difference between the 3060 and 2060 too, it’s just not as much of a
boost, the 3060 was around 22% faster at all resolutions.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode.
At 1080p the 3060 was reaching 21% higher average FPS when compared to the 2060, but
this increases to a 33% lead at 1440p, then a much larger 52% increase at 4K, outlining
that the difference increases as the resolution rises.
Second last game before the big comparison.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the game's benchmark.
This one had an above average improvement with the 3060 when compared to the 2060, meanwhile
the 3060 was reaching more than twice the average FPS that the 1060 was capable of.
The Witcher 3 is a game I’ve been testing the same way for about 5 years now, so it’s
a good one to throw in if you want to see how results compare to any of my older videos.
Anyway there was a much smaller difference between the 2060 and 3060 here, hardly worth
an upgrade at all, though this is an older game and both were much better when compared
to the 1060.
These are the differences in all 12 titles tested between the RTX 3060 and GTX 1060 at
1080p.
The 3060 was almost 100% faster, or around twice the average FPS on average, so a pretty
decent boost.
Most people with a 1060 are probably running around 1080p, so yeah in the games I’ve
tested here on average you can expect a 2x boost with the 3060.
This increases to a 109% improvement going from 1060 to 3060 with the higher 1440p resolution.
The 1060 is capable of 1440p in some games, it of course depends on the setting levels
used, but again the point remains that on average more than a 2x boost can be possible
with an upgrade.
4K isn’t really where the 1060 was aimed at, so I suppose this one is more of a “for
science” result as this resolution is loading up the GPUs nicely, leading to an average
133% boost with the 3060.
Now let’s look at how the 2060 and 3060 compare.
At 1080p the 3060 was 22% ahead on average, so a much smaller difference compared to the
older 1060.
It of course varies by game, but for the most part I think this is a pretty small difference.
Things increase at 1440p with the 3060 now on average around 27% faster than the 2060
in these selection of games.
It depends on the title, but some like Cyberpunk saw small differences - that is with ray tracing
off.
With ray tracing enabled the 3060 seems to have a nice lead over the 2060, at least in
this game, as the control result with ray tracing on was more in line with the rest
of the games.
This changes at 4K though, the top two results are ray tracing tests, but as outlined earlier
it’s hard to say how much of this improvement is solely due to ray tracing hardware upgrades
with the 30 series and how much may be due to the 3060 having double the VRAM, as that’s
going to be pretty important at this higher resolution.
I’ve got a dedicated RTX test soon though so stay tuned.
Despite performing better in Control at 4K, the RTX 3060 was actually using slightly less
power than the 2060, though the two were close.
The 1060 is using less power, but the 3060 was also reaching 236% higher average FPS
in this test.
Basically the 3060 is winning here in terms of performance per watt, as it was capable
of hitting higher FPS while drawing a little less power in the same system.
I haven’t tested thermals here as all of my graphics cards have different cooling designs,
so temperatures will vary due to this, it just wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
Now let’s check out the differences in content creator workloads followed by pricing afterwards.
I’ve tested DaVinci Resolve with the Puget Systems benchmark.
This software seems to be fairly GPU heavy, though the differences were far smaller when
compared to the games just covered.
The 3060 was reaching a 16% higher score compared to the 2060, but a 68% higher score compared
to the older 1060.
Adobe Premiere was also tested with the puget systems benchmark, however the GPU seems to
be less of a factor here.
The 2060 and 3060 were scoring very close together, and the 3060 was scoring around
25% higher than the 1060.
It was a different story in the V-Ray benchmark though, the 3060 was reaching a score 250%
higher compared to the 1060 in the CUDA test, or 46% higher compared to the 2060.
Vray also offers a ray tracing test, and the 3060 was around 60% higher in this one shown
by the darker purple bars.
Blender was tested with the Open Data Benchmark with the BMW and Classroom tests using CUDA.
The 3060 was 237% faster than the 1060 in the longer classroom test, or 112% ahead of
the 2060, more than two times faster, so there can be some bigger differences between the
2060 and 3060 outside of gaming.
Now let’s discuss price.
According to Nvidia, the RTX 3060 is launching with an MSRP of $330 USD.
Good luck with that.
Based on the shortages and high prices of other GPUs at the moment that just seems pretty
unlikely.
Coreteks has reported prices closer to $500 prior to launch, unfortunately I’m making
this video prior to launch so I haven’t been able to confirm, but you can check out
updated prices with the links down in the description, of course assuming there’s
actually stock.
The 2060 had a more expensive $350 MSRP back when it launched in 2019, but checking Newegg
and sorting from lowest, well, let’s just say things aren’t looking good there either.
Even second hand 1060s are currently on eBay for around $200, so yeah definitely not good
times out there.
Due to these crazy prices differences I just don’t feel comfortable making my usual performance
per dollar graph.
Sure, I could use the MSRP but that’s not particularly useful as you can’t buy them
at those prices.
That said, hopefully things do get under control in the future, so with that in mind I have
made the graph, but again it’s not really going to be particularly useful unless things
come back to normal.
I only decided to add it into the video at the last minute just in case it helps someone
months from now when prices might be more normal.
Basically assuming MSRP prices the 3060 wins.
It performs better for the money, regardless of resolution.
In a normal world the 1060 and 2060 would be available for less second hand, but that’s
not the case currently.
I guess you could argue why make this video at all if you can’t buy any of these, and
look I get where you’re coming from, but fact is some people will actually be able
to get their hands on these, so why not have that data out there to make an informed decision.
Plus I do believe the content will be useful later on, whether that’s one month, three
months, six months, a year - I have no idea.
It really does suck, but that’s just the way it is at the moment.
Assuming prices do actually get to their MSRP, basically to summarize, the 3060 is cheaper
than the 2060 but also performs better.
If you already have a 2060, it’s not really worth upgrading to the 3060.
In most cases the performance gains just weren’t that big, but if you’re still on a 1060
then upgrading to a 3060 would be a pretty big improvement.
So that’s pretty much it, if you’re new to the channel get subscribed for more upcoming
GPU comparisons and tech videos like this one, and I guess let me know in the comments
if you would get a 3060 if it was actually reasonably priced and in stock.