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The 6500 XT turns in one of its better figures in Far Cry 6 and as a result the 3050 was just 14% faster, though the issue for the 6500 XT is PCIe 3.0 and when compared to that configuration the 3050 was 37% faster. Those margins remained at 1440p. Here the RTX 3050 was 37% faster than the 6500 XT, or 58% faster when using PCIe 3.0. It only managed 41 fps on average, so for this game I'd say the RTX 3050 is better suited for 1080p gameplay. Power Consumption Though that is a little unfair because the Ampere architecture at the heart of the RTX 3050 is fundamentally better than that of the Turing GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660 Ti. Again, the same can be said of the RDNA 2 tech beating beneath the RX 6500 XT's oversized coolers, when compared to the Graphics Core Next (GCN) of the RX 480. I am a huge fan of DLSS, however, and it does mean that the RTX 3050 isn't just a good 1080p gaming GPU, it's actually capable of running happily on a 1440p display too. Though DLSS isn't in every game and Nvidia's new game-agnostic Nvidia Image Scaling (roughly analogous to FSR) is available to its older GPUs, too.
The GA106 GPU Nvidia reportedly has at the heart of the RTX 3050 is a smaller version than that used in the RTX 3060 which makes it roughly the same size as the chip used in the old GTX 1660 Ti. It does though have almost double the number of transistors at its heart and, thanks to the excellent Ampere architecture it comes with over one thousand more shaders inside it.The RTX 3050 was 52% faster than the 6500 XT at 1080p using the second highest quality preset with 141 fps on average. PCIe 3.0 completely crippled the 6500 XT and now the RTX 3050 is seen to be 114% faster, and I should note I got the exact same result using PCIe 3.0 with the RTX 3050.
On Cyberpunk 2077 we find that DLSS is most impressive, boosting rasterization performance by an incredible 48%, allowing the RTX 3050 to beat the Radeon RX 6600. Then using ray tracing without DLSS enabled saw the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 delivering comparable performance at 30-40 fps. But of course, enabling DLSS offered a big boost and then the RTX 3050 was good for around 60 fps on average. It is also notable that AMD's latest GPU, the Navi 24 silicon inside the RX 6500 XT is a 107mm2 chip, while the GA106 is something in the region of 276mm2. That's something which will likely come into play when it comes to manufacturing and the numbers of GPUs that each company can produce to fulfil the demand for their cards.Now the RTX 3050 is 24% faster than the 6500 XT at 1440p. It was also a few frames faster than the 1660 Super and trailed the RTX 2060 by 15%. For those of you wondering why we are comparing with the RX 6600 and not the 6500 XT for the ray tracing benchmark, we simply didn't want to be so cruel. Seriously though, the 6500 XT is so weak with ray tracing enabled that the data isn't useful for comparison. Cost Per Frame We don't feel the RTX 3050's rasterization performance is powerful enough to justify turning ray traced effects on, but you can, and some of you might want to anyway, so let's take a look. Even at 1440p, the RTX 3050 managed well over 60 fps and this made it 9% faster than the RTX 2060, and 35% faster than the 6500 XT, a great result given the current market.
It was also 24% faster than the 6500 XT and dropping the Radeon graphics card down to PCIe 3.0 only extended the margin to 27%, so you could argue that this is a good result for the Radeon. Yes, DLSS taps into the RTX 3050s Tensor Cores AI co-processors found exclusively on RTX 30 Series graphics cards to intelligently reconstruct supported games from a lower input resolution to a higher output resolution, 720p to 1080p for example, with fantastic results. DLSS produces images that are comparable to or sometimes even better than native resolution rendering. DLSS is a game-changer for performance and image quality, and lets the RTX 3050 punch ways above its weight. What PSU do I need for the RTX 3050? Last up we have Cyberpunk 2077, and here the RTX 3050 managed to break the 60 fps barrier with the medium quality preset, averaging 66 fps which all things considered is quite a good result. Unfortunately, it was 18% slower than the RTX 2060, but it was also 40% faster than the 6500 XT, or 69% faster when using PCIe 3.0. This makes the RTX 3050 highly adept for esports on a high refresh rate gaming monitor, and cinematic, big-budget games running at a 1080p resolution as well. Ultra-high resolutions such as 4K in AAA games are off the cards for the RTX 3050, but it is more than adequate for 1080p, the most popular resolution for gaming by far. Does the RTX 3050 support DLSS? And here's a look at the 12 game average data, which has been calculated using the geomean. The RTX 3050 averaged 108fps at 1080p, which made it just 5% slower than the GTX 1660 Super, 10% slower than the RTX 2060, and 23% slower than the Radeon RX 6600.The RTX 3050 does not skimp out on video memory. Even though it is classed as an entry-level graphics card, the RTX 3050 is loaded up with 8GB of super-fast GDDR6 VRAM. This lets you enable high-res textures in games, arguably the most important graphics option, without experiencing judders as new textures are loaded into memory. In a compatible motherboard, the RTX 3050 runs over a PCIe Gen4 interface with eight lanes for high bandwidth. Read more The game was playable with ray tracing enabled and DLSS, delivering ~60 fps on average. Without DLSS, the frame rate dropped into the low 40s, and that's about the same level of ray tracing performance than you can expect from the RX 6600 in this title. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. Moving on to Far Cry 6, we find an average of 96 fps using the GeForce RTX 3050 at 1080p with the medium quality preset. As we've seen multiple times already, it's basically delivering 1660 Super performance, though it wasn't a great deal slower than the 2060 in this one, at least when looking at the average frame rate.
Testing with Far Cry 6, which doesn't support DLSS, sees the RTX 3050 able to comfortably break the 60 fps barrier with ray tracing fully enabled. It was slower than the much more expensive RX 6600, but whereas it was 28% slower without RT enabled, it was just 14% slower with it enabled. Next we have Horizon Zero Dawn where the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0 did well relative to most other games with 72 fps on average. The RTX 3050 was 14% faster, though with both using PCIe 3.0 the GeForce GPU would be a massive 55% faster. So, while the benchmarks highlight where the RTX 3050 is more or less akin to the GTX 1660 Ti in terms of its straight gaming performance, there is the promise of DLSS working those Tensor Cores to actually make the card a pretty capable 1440p gaming GPU where the technology is enabled. Moving to 1440p increases the margin in favor of the 3050, which is now 66% faster than the 6500 XT when using PCI 4.0 and 128% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. We're also looking at slightly better performance than the GTX 1660 Super. It's worth keeping in mind that at this price point, the RX 6600 is technically better value as it costs just 24% more, but offers 26% more performance. Granted, they are about the same in terms of value, but when spending this much, the RX 6600 does become a viable alternative. What Does It Need to Cost?
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When compared to the 1660 Super, it was 5% faster and 15% slower than the 5600 XT and RTX 2060, so a little behind when compared to those older models. In Doom Eternal, the RTX 3050 does extremely well matching the RTX 2060 with 178 fps on average. That meant it was 82% faster than the 6500 XT and 287% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. That's all we need to say about that. If that's the case, then you're best off being upsold to the RX 6600, or perhaps the smarter option would be to look for a cheaper second hand option to tie you over. If you are after one of the best budget graphics cards, you are looking in the right place. Even as the cheapest graphics card in the RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3050 offers up NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for AI-enhanced image reconstruction in games, real-time raytracing and more. The situation worsens for the 6500 XT at 1440p once again. Now even with PCIe 4.0 we can't even achieve a 40 fps average, meanwhile the RTX 3050 fell just shy of 60 fps and was seen matching the 1660 Super.
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