this is an rtx 3050 it is an eagle variant sent over by gigabyte and it is the
loseriest rdx graphics card that you can buy today
uh which made me think i wonder if the loseriest rtx graphics card can do
the hardest rtx thing so let's see what it takes to get this rtx 3050 to do some ray tracing
[Music]
oh that is a nice futuristic looking eye on the box
it's quite little look at that
[Music] the whole card is just covered in this film of plastic
oh yeah there we go that is a very interesting paint finish on the card i actually really
like it it's kind of like a matte gray um it's definitely plastic but you know it is it is a
relatively budget card i mean you know it's it's 20 22 so this is probably still gonna sell for
eight thousand dollars on the used market but uh yeah it's a pretty good looking little card let's
have a quick look at the specs of the new baby rtx graphics card the render config looks like this
and as you can see it's got less gpu stuff in it than the previous runt of the rtx litter the 2060.
interestingly the rtx 3050 has more video memory running 8 gigs of gtd r6
as opposed to 6 gigs of gddr6 although the memory bus is a bit smaller at 128 bit as opposed to 192
bit on the 2060. and according to tech powerups gpu tier list these hardware changes means that
the rtx 3050 lags about 16 percent behind its beefier big brother with that there's just one
more quick thing we have to have a look at before we throw the 3050 into the ray traced gauntlet
as is tradition on this channel every time we have a graphics card we we just
we have to take it apart and see what's going on underneath the cooler
[Music] instead of a warranty void sticker they have a gigabyte qualified sticker
which does that mean it will or won't catch on fire [Music]
um i've been screwing for a while and this screw isn't coming undone
the screw is fine so i think it's like a like a thread issue in the plastic
uh because i i can't i can't get that screw on done the one has come undone but it oh
okay that just kind of popped out like that yeah unfortunately you can't really see in there but
there was definitely some kind of threading issue going on there you can actually see some
unconsensual plastic debris still left on the screw anyway here is the bottom of the cooler
which is a pretty standard lower end graphics card cooler you've got a single heat pipe going through
that actually makes direct contact with the die and then you've got a whole bunch of thermal pad
all over the place it seems like gigabyte is so scared of getting roasted for incomplete
thermal pad coverage that they added thermal pads to spots where there are no modules for
the pads to contact but you know that's that's going above and beyond i guess
and here is the bear pcb which as you can see there's a whole bunch of space for higher-end
versions of this eagle card there's even additional sets of solder points for more fans
and rgb and stuff so yeah you can scale this pcb up uh but yeah with that let's actually clean off
the thermal paste and have a closer look at an rtx 3050 dime and there is quite a theic die for a 50
series card it's a pretty big gpu with that let's put it back together and get into some ray tracing
[Music]
okay now we're starting off with quake 2 which i think may be the easiest game to
run with ray tracing if i'm not mistaken uh we're currently running with it in
opengl and you can see that we're steadily running at a thousand frames per second
this is the smoothest thing i have ever seen oh there's a man
it looks very different now it's much brighter actually like the environment is is much
better lit and uh we've lost a whole bunch of frame rates but it's still
running well i i think it would have been a really bad start if if this didn't run that would not
have been a good sign at all but uh it's running fine but with that let's try something a bit
more modern i've found that controls performance seems to not suffer that much when ray tracing is
enabled although it's not super promising to start off with because here it's running just at high
settings at 1080p with no ray tracing and we're hovering around 60 frames per second at the moment
let's just go straight to high rate racing we're looking at just over half the frame rate we had
before uh and that's with nothing going on in the scene we're not like fighting anyone or anything
oh yeah it does not feel very good but luckily we do have a secret weapon in terms of ray tracing
so let's see if turning on dlss helps much oh that feels way better and considering that
normally control looks like it's rendered in a tub of vaseline it doesn't look much worse
okay it's time for the original poster boy of rtx this is running at 1080p high settings
it feels good this is this is nice this is a very solid gaming experience yeah so let's ruin it well
i mean look it it's definitely reduced the frame rate and i would not recommend running it with ray
tracing considering that i don't think i could really tell the difference straight off the bat
uh but it's kind of it's working you know this is a very playable frame rate wow okay so let's see
if we can push it harder uh but okay so it's all on ultra now as opposed to high oh see there's
some there's some fire on our gun yes that's worth half the frame rate definitely oh yes my
favorite disappointment cyberpunk here 1080p uh at medium-ish settings we're getting about 60 frames
per second so it's it's very playable on this gpu so let's just be brave initially and crank it
to psycho hell yeah let's see does it look better than it did before like maybe some of the lighting
a little bit i don't know let's get in a car and drive around that usually completely breaks
it oh yes no that is that is some primo gaming performance we've got right here i have an idea
let's try and enable dlss maybe that helps a bit balanced oh that's made it that's made it much
better now we're still sub 60 frames per second here but at least the game doesn't feel like
it's being played via dial-up anymore although having said that at this point we haven't seen
real performance carnage yet so let's take it to the next level let's try psycho ray tracing at 4k
ah there we go that was that was more along the lines of what i was expecting in terms of
in terms of gaming performance let's see if dlss can save this nightmare oh it still doesn't like
that at all maybe ultra performance is better so at the moment we're running at 4k using psycho
ray tracing with ultra performance dlss which i think is probably one of the dumbest game
settings you can run cyberpunk in like i don't think i don't think you can go dumber than that
uh but i mean it's kind of running it looks pretty good but i guess it's because the render
resolution is essentially 1080p now the final game that we obviously need to test is turtle simulator
remastered now i actually read on my google propaganda feed that it's been fixed they've done
a bunch of patches and it runs way better so yeah let's also test that out here let me just get to
a more sunny bit of the game because for some reason it doesn't seem to have cloud saves okay so
at 1080p high settings we are struggling to stay in 60 frames per second it does touch it every now
and then uh but it does look very beautiful now i'm gonna start off with performance and just see
how much of a difference that makes but this is fine this is perfectly playable i think
it's it's a bit input laggy honestly i actually wouldn't play it this way let's try very high
they may actually have fixed the performance here because adding ray tracing hasn't had much
of a negative effect although let's try crank it it's starting to struggle a little bit now but
still it's kind of playable um whether or not it looks better now than it did without ray tracing
on i i guess is up for debate although by looking at side by side footage i think how they fixed
the performance impact was just make the setting not do anything because i can't tell a difference
that went pretty well i was kind of expecting the graphics card to copiously soil itself
like a small child getting on stage for the first time in front of its hard hard-ass
ray-traced parents but that didn't happen although that being said uh there was still a reasonable
performance impact uh with a lot of these games and in a bunch of them it was you couldn't tell
it was on like in some of them i i genuinely thought that the settings didn't apply
uh but they did you could tell because it was running a lot slower so even three ish years
after the initial introduction of ray tracing it's still pretty dumb uh so hopefully three years from
now maybe it'll be better i guess uh at least dlss is quite nice uh so yeah that brings me to the end
of the video thank you very much for watching if you liked the video like and subscribe to
the channel we are very close to 400 000 so if you can help push us over that edge that'll be
really nice thank you and yeah until the next video thank you for watching bye [Music] you