This is the Geforce 3060 TI. It’s claimed to be a bit faster than the Geforce 2080 Super,
but for $399- a whole $100 cheaper than the next card up, the 3070.
With the newest generation of graphics cards, like the Nvidia 3000 or AMD 6000 series, we’ve
seen the fastest and most expensive cards first. These are always fascinating, since
they offer previously unseen levels of performance, at equally high price points. But this leave
them out of reach of most people- that’s why there are lower tiers, like the 60 series
from Nvidia which generally becomes the mid-range card of choice for people wanting good gaming
performance at a more attainable price. So I guess, if I had to define the 3060 TI,
it’s the premium version of Nvidia’s new mid-range offerings. It’s a little unusual
for it to come out before the version without the TI has done. In fact, the 3060 without
the TI isn’t even a thing just yet. But Nvidia’s choice to launch the 3060 TI first
is no surprise when we look at the situation Nvidia and AMD find themselves in right now.
Neither company can keep up with the demand for their high-end cards. The moment they’re
in stock, they’re immediately snapped up again. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Since these are products they make the biggest profit margins on, and demand greatly outstrips
supply, there’s not much incentive to give buyers the option of a cheaper card.
So with that in mind, the fact the 3060 TI is coming out tomorrow is a small miracle
for consumers desperate for a new card but unable to get their hands on anything faster,
and it sounds like these cards will be available in greater quantities than those above them…
though whether that’s enough to keep up with demand for them remains to be seen.
So what’s this card like? And who’s it for?
I’ll be honest: I don’t have access to the same hardware as a lot of reviewers out
there do. I don’t have the Geforce 2080 Super, which the 3060 TI performs similarly
to, nor do I have a 2060 Super, the card it’s going to replace in the price-stack. So I’ll
be approaching this video as a series of questions you might have about it, which I can answer.
First of all: the card itself. I like that it’s physically smaller than the high-end
cards. I have a few cases that struggle to fit in a 3080-sized card, but I will have
no problem with this one. I also like that Nvidia have used the same cooling system that
they’ve used in their higher end designs- the end of it is all fan, so the card itself
is even smaller than it looks here. And I love that, since it’s rated for 200 watts,
that it’s got better power efficiency than the relative performance offered by the bigger
3080, and it only requires 1 8-pin power connector to run it. Though as you can see, it still
uses that new power cable thing, which Nvidia seems to be pushing as the new standard on
all of their 3000 series cards. Let’s get onto performance.
I first tried just testing the latest and most reflective titles I could find on the
3060 TI. For some reason neither fraps, frameviewer nor the built-in Nvidia framerate counter
showed up in these recordings, so you’ll just have to go by my observations. Watchdogs
Legion is a demanding game- especially when driving about the city. At 1440p, ultra settings,
the 3060 TI averaged between 40 and 45 FPS. I then turned on ultra raytracing and this
sent it plummeting down to about 12 fps, completely unplayable. Using DLSS at ‘balanced’ preset
brought this right up to 40-45 FPS again- in other words, DLSS cancelled out the raytracing
hit entirely. That’s with ultra settings. I dropped it all down to the ‘very high’
quality preset, and used the ‘high’ raytracing setting and it ran between 35 and 45 FPS without
DLSS being enabled. Enabling DLSS sent this well above 60 FPS when on foot, and between
55 and 70 FPS when driving around. You can see the importance of DLSS in this
title- it really is required for acceptable performance when raytracing’s enabled. IF
every game supported DLSS then this wouldn’t be a problem. But only a select few titles
have it for now. Luckily, these tend to be the ones with raytracing which need it the
most. The other game I tested was Call of Duty Black
Ops Cold War. I maxed out all of the settings in this game, PLUS the high resolution texture
pack, PLUS raytracing all ramped up to maximum settings. And this game ran consistently around
the 60-70 FPS mark for the majority of the time. It dropped to the 40’s for a few seconds
when I was running up some stairs, then was nearer to 90 FPS when on the rooftops.
Switching DLSS Balanced mode on and the average shot up to the 90’s. It was extremely smooth
and playable. I’m happy to report that this game ran well without DLSS, and VERY well
with it.
3080 vs 3060TI Comparing the 3060 TI with Nvidia’s current
gaming ‘flagship’, you give up some performance. In the titles I tested, it was on average
82% the speed of the 3080 at 1440p, 70% at 4K, and 65% of the speed when raytracing was
enabled. Considering the 3060 TI only has 56% of the RT cores the 3080 has, it’s outperforming
how it should be faring, given its specs. I’m expecting there to be some CPU-bottlenecking
going on at lower resolutions so I feel like the 65-70% figure is more representative of
this card’s speed compared to the 3080. The resulting framerate difference will be
most felt at higher resolutions- at 4K, the 3060 TI more often than not came below 60
FPS, while the 3080’s extra power was enough to keep it above that magical figure. But
at 1440p, unless you’re using absolute ultra settings, both cards can deliver beautifully
smooth performance in the latest titles. It’s just in next year’s games and beyond where
having cards above the 3060 TI will begin to pay off.
In my main rig, I’ve gone from a 3080 to the 3060 TI, and have used only that for the
last few weeks. In the games I’ve been playing I’ve hardly noticed any difference, outside
of benchmarks designed to test the card. It’s just that right now there are so few games
that will challenge this tier of performance. The hit seemed to be a bit greater in raytraced
situations. For example, it was only 63% the speed of the 3080 in the Quake 2 RTX demo.
This example stood out to me as being one of the games currently available where the
speed differences between these cards can be felt at 1440p. Using default settings,
the 3080 averaged 78 FPS, while the 3060 TI’s 49 doesn’t feel quite as fluid, or my mouse
movements, quite as responsive. The Quake 2 test is interesting because it’s one of
the few FULLY ray-traced games out there right now. Most, like Watchdogs or Call of Duty,
only raytrace certain elements on the screen and so the performance impact tends to be
lesser in those titles. The 3060 TI had no problem powering the newest Call of Duty at
ultra settings at 1440p, for instance, and Watchdogs is probably a bad example cos it
runs poorly even without raytracing. But the Quake 2 demo does show that this card may
not have the power required to fully raytrace scenes at this resolution, and may instead
need to rely on upscaling like DLSS to hit the 60 FPS mark. Running Quake 2 at 75% resolution
scaling, which is 1080p upscaled to 1440p, brought the average up to 80 FPS while still
looking clear and detailed. In short: on average it’s 70% of the 3080’s
performance, at 57% of the price. VS Geforce 2080 TI / 3070
Although faster than the 2080 Super, the 3060 TI can’t beat the 2080 TI for performance,
which was Nvidia’s flagship card until the 3000 series came out. In my testing, it was
93% of the 2080 TI’s performance at 1440p, 88% at 4K, and 89% when raytracing and or
dlss was enabled. Bear with me for a second while I nerd out
by discussing the inner workings of these cards. You shouldn’t care much about this-
it is, after all, the resulting card that matters. But it is still interesting to compare
a ‘big’ 2000 series card with a ‘cut-down’ 3000 series one, such as the 3060 TI.
These two generations aren’t directly comparable- they’re based on different architectures
which behave very differently. For instance, on paper the 3060 TI actually has ‘more’
CUDA cores than the 2080 TI does, but has far fewer tensor cores, RT cores and texture
units. The RESULT of this change is what matters, though. And the 3060 TI manages 90% of the
performance at 80% of the power draw… and is being sold for 40% of the price. However
it’s achieved it, Ampere does offer improved efficiency per frame generated. And even more
importantly than that, people in the market for a graphics card today will get more performance
for their money than they would have done a few years ago.
The 3080 was already faster than the 2080 TI, but its lead grew further when raytracing
was enabled, possibly thanks to the new and improved RT cores seen in the 3000 series.
But this ‘advantage’ doesn’t carry across to the 3060 TI. Its raytracing performance
remains constant with the other results compared to the 2080 TI, suggesting that whatever improvements
have been made to Ampere’s cores have been cancelled out by the vastly cut down number
of them seen in this card. I guess it’s a shame, but the fact still stands that this
card delivers 90% of the 2080 TI’s performance, regardless of what you throw at it. Apart
from Port Royal which it doesn’t seem to like much at all.
I’m not too surprised to see that the 2080 TI’s faster- in the new lineup, it’s the
3070 that matches it- though that card costs $100 more than the 3060 TI so you’ve got
to decide whether it’s worth spending 20% more to close the gap you see here.
VS PREVIOUS GENERATIONS So far I’ve only compared the 3060 TI to
cards faster than itself. It’s fun to do that, but the people getting the 3060 TI will
be doing so because they’re on something slower than it right now. So I went about
and tested the older cards I found lying about in my room to see what sort of jump up in
performance the 3060 TI could deliver.
The oldest of the cards is the Geforce 970, 4 GB. This is over 6(!) years old now. If
you had got one of these new, it would have delivered incredible performance for years.
It was based on a new, super efficient architecture, could shadowplay record up to 4K, and wasn’t
much slower than the much more expensive 980. Every time I mention this card, people quickly
point out it’s only 3.5 GB + half GB, to which I’ll reply with ‘but that makes
4’. The 3060 TI proves to be a MASSIVE jump up.
In Timespy, the 3060 TI is almost 3 times faster. And in the Superposition Benchmark,
almost 4 times faster than the Geforce 970. The 970 limped along in the 1440p benchmark
results. It can still achieve 60 FPS in Rainbow Six Siege at max settings, native 1440p. And
Troy Total War on the High preset was still very playable. But in the rest of the titles
it’s clear the 970 no longer has what it takes at this resolution. It would take a
cruel person with a cold heart to push this card any further than 1440p.
Next up, the 4K results and this is where the 970 finally gives up. It simply didn’t
have the RAM to even enable Red Dead 2 at this resolution, and it started underperforming
in other games as well. To all those people who said its 3.5 GB of VRAM wasn’t enough:
I finally agree with you. It isn’t, at 4K, 6 years after the card came out. If you’re
still on this card then the 3060 TI will be a great jump up for you. Although you’d
kind of hope for this, what with the 970 being a $330 card in 2014, and the 3060 TI being
a $400 card in 2020.
The next one is the Radeon 480, with 8 GB of VRAM. This was the first ‘VR-Ready’
GPU for under $200, though admittedly the 8 GB version cost $40 more. This was Polaris’s
first debut and remained AMD’s shining star for years, returning to power the 500 series
and proving to be a remarkably powerful mining card. At one point this thing would have been
worth several times its original $200 price. Those who didn’t have it wished they had
bought one, and those who did have it wished they had bought 2, since otherwise if they
sold it they’d be left without a graphics card and nothing around this time was particularly
cheap. I’ve kept the 970’s results in here for
reference. I know this video is about the 3060 TI but actually I’m more interested
in comparing the 970 with the 480 here. At 1440p it either manages the same performance
as the 970, or substantially more, even pushing into playable framerates in Assassins Creed
and Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the 970’s results are more questionable. And 4K stretches
the 480’s advantage even further still. Probably thanks to its 8 GB of VRAM, it WAS
able to run Red Dead 2, and didn’t fail horribly in Wolfenstein either. It even manages
to be more than HALF the speed of the Geforce 3060 TI in Assassins Creed Odyssey. It seems
like it’s a game that favours AMD hardware more than Nvidia’s. But still, on average,
the Radeon 480 8 GB is just 37% of the speed of the 3060 TI. But it’s worth remembering
that we’re comparing a $240 GPU from 2016 with a $400 GPU from 2020 here.
This next card’s an interesting one. It’s the Vega 56! This was intended to be the ‘high
end’ part of AMD’s lineup, positioned above the Radeon 480. It sounded great on
paper, with its 8 GB of next-gen HBM memory and stuff, but it wasn’t power-efficient
and it came out a year later than it should have done to be a proper competitor to the
1000 series. Still, it was fast enough to do what it needed to do, and later became
a great value card for 1440p gaming, and is still powering AMD’s APUs to this day. There’s
more I’d like to say about this card, but let’s just move onto the results.
In timespy it manages to be 57% the speed of the geforce 3060 TI, which is an excellent
result for the AMD card. It doesn’t do so well in the Superposition Benchmark at 1080p
Extreme settings though, falling well behind the 3060 TI and managing just 3 FPS more than
the 480. Vega just seems really bad in Superposition for some reason. The 1440p results were where
the Vega 56 was strongest, scoring as high as 69%... and averaging 58% the speed of the
3060 TI. But that difference still matters! The 3060 TI’s extra power allowed it to
achieve smooth performance while Vega’s was choppy, or to break through to triple
digits while Vega’s was still not much over 60. And for some reason, the Vega didn’t
do well at 4K at all, often not doing much better than the much less powerful Radeon
480 did. If I look at all of the results, the Geforce 3060 TI ends up being about twice
the speed of the Vega 56, often being as fast at 4K as the Vega 56 is at 1440p.
And last, I tested the Geforce 1660 Super. This is the most recent of the ‘budget’
cards I’m testing, it only came out late last year and represents the fastest card
Nvidia currently sells before you need to move to its RTX lineup. It’s a bit slower
than the 2060 series, but I can imagine that some people may have opted for a 1660 as they
waited for the raytracing technology to mature somewhat, so perhaps that’s why people might
be interested in moving from a 1660 to a 3060. Its results were very similar to the Vega
56’s. It wasn’t quite as fast as the Vega card at 1440p, but beat it at 4K. Which is
strange really, since it only has 6 GB of VRAM compared with Vega’s 8. On average
the 1660 Super proved to be about half the speed of the Geforce 3060 TI. Not a bad leap
for a single generation. Or is it two? It gets confusing with Nvidia’s 1600 series.
Onto the conclusion. There are two ways to see the Geforce 3060 TI. The first is to compare
it with the other new Nvidia and AMD cards. And that makes the 3060 TI an attractive proposition:
it contains all the same features, for a lot less money. It’s the price VS performance
king right now. If you’re looking for a new card and simply must have it before Cyberpunk
comes out then yes, this is a great card to get for raytracing, but do be warned that
it’s going to be about 10% slower than the 3070, which is the card that’s recommended
for playing Cyberpunk at 1440p with raytracing, on ultra settings. Still, when looking at
its performance, the 3060 TI has got more overhead at 1440p than the 3080 does at 4K.
The second way to look at the 3060 TI is to compare it with older cards. If you’re still
on a Geforce 970, Radeon 480, or I’m guessing Geforce 1060, which would perform similarly
to them, then the 3060 TI will deliver about 3x more performance, meaning you can go up
a resolution, switch on some raytracing effects and still have enough horsepower to enjoy
faster framerates as well. If you’re sitting on a more powerful, older
card, like a Vega 56, 5600XT, Geforce 1070 or 1660, the 3060 TI will still deliver roughly
double the performance, depending on the game and resolution. That’s a good jump up. One
that you’d notice and appreciate. But you might question whether you were hoping for
more from a $400 graphics card- especially when it’s cost you more than the one you’re
currently on, and have been for several years already. I think whether or not the 3060 TI
is worth it will depend on how interested you are in raytracing, because if you are
then it’s a good card with enough power to do it justice, especially in conjunction
with DLSS.
The reason I’m mentioning prices so much is because we’re in a strange time for computer
hardware. Progress HAS slowed down for the last few years. Something tells me it’s
picking up again now, but if you’ve been a PC gamer recently the chances are you’ve
been using the same hardware for longer than you’ve ever done before, because graphics
cards from several years ago can STILL drive today’s games- if at lower resolutions,
and without raytracing.
And it’s an interesting time for cards with 8 GB of VRAM. 5 years ago, when the Radeon
390 came out with that amount, I saw it as overkill. Then, with the Vega and Geforce
1000 series, 8 GBs started to feel like a sensible amount for the high-end to have.
And now, we’re beginning to transition away from 8 and towards greater amounts in the
high-end, like 10 GB in the 3080 and 16 for the RX 6800 series. But this is still only
reserved for the super high-end for now. So when it comes to the 3060 TI’s 8 GB of the
stuff, I still think it’s an acceptable amount for a card of this tier. Remember-
the Geforce 2060 only had 6 when it first came out. So having 8 GB is at the worst,
a sideways move from last generation’s 2060 Super.
There has definitely been a price-creep going on. The 3060 TI at $400 is the joint most
expensive ’60’ tier card we’ve ever seen, sharing the honour with that 2060 Super,
from last generation. Before then, the $400 pricepoint would have got you a ‘70’ tier
of card, like the Geforce 1070, and before that the Geforce 970 was just $330. We’re
now paying more for a 60 tier of card than we used to for a 70 tier!
The one silver lining is that, while it’s $400 for a 60 tier card, it is still the ‘TI’
variant; a premium 60 series, implying that a cheaper, vanilla 3060 will come out at some
point later on. I await that card’s price and performance with great interest. For now,
ignoring how prices might have inflated, the Geforce 3060 TI marks the premium mid-range
segment. It can drive modern games at 1440p with raytracing performance that’s 90% as
fast as the previous gen’s flagship. It’s twice as fast as last generation’s mid-range
cards, and 3 times as fast as $250 cards from 4 years ago.
So there you have it: the Geforce 3060 TI. A big step up from older cards, a smaller
step down from newer ones, and the first of the new generation to be less than $400.