Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 review: A truly modern GPU for the masses (hopefully)

A yr and a half into the latest generation of graphics cards—one affected by chip shortages, logistics woes, tariffs, crypto demand, and scalpers—we’re lastly beginning to see the primary GPUs for PC players on a tighter price range. And because the GeForce RTX 3050 we’re reviewing right this moment exhibits, Nvidia and AMD couldn’t be going about it any extra in another way.

AMD landed the primary strike. The Radeon RX 6500 XT arrived simply final week, and AMD made some hard compromises to hit its low $199 value level. AMD’s low-cost card strips out varied options we’ve sometimes come to anticipate, and packs simply 4GB of onboard reminiscence with a scant 64-bit bus. That’ll assist it evade the attention of crypto miners and hopefully release provide on the streets, however AMD’s reminiscence strategy restricts the 6500 XT to 1080p gaming on Medium or High settings. Push past that, and efficiency stumbles laborious.

Nvidia, then again, takes the other route with the $250 GeForce RTX 3050. It’s basically a standard graphics card, utilizing a cut-down RTX 3060 GPU with 8GB of VRAM and an ordinary 128-bit reminiscence bus. This dangerous boy is constructed to run video games with eye sweet cranked up and people wonderful real-time rays a-tracin’.

The reminiscence configuration will seemingly make the RTX 3050 extra enticing to miners (although it wields Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate tech) when it launches on January 26, so we’ll need to see whether or not it or the Radeon RX 6500 XT wind up being extra broadly out there on the streets. But there’s no query that the RTX 3050 completely spanks AMD’s GPU within the benchmark sheets. Let’s dig in.

GeForce RTX 3050 specs, options and value

The GeForce RTX 3050 makes use of a pared-back model of the GA106 GPU discovered within the RTX 3060. As such, it packs a lot beefier specs than the GTX 1650 Nvidia makes use of within the spec comparability chart beneath. (It’s additionally value noting that the GTX 1650 launched at $150, a full $100 lower than the RTX 3050.)

The RTX 3050 tops out on the identical 1,777MHz enhance clock pace as a reference spec, matching the RTX 3060’s charge. But it has fewer CUDA cores—2560, versus 3584—together with fewer ROPs and texture items. That clearly impacts efficiency. The RTX 3050 additionally wields a full array of Nvidia’s devoted second-gen RT cores to allow real-time ray tracing, and 80 third-gen tensor cores to assist with DLSS, Nvidia Broadcast, and different AI-infused duties. The Radeon RX 6500 XT ostensibly contains ray tracing {hardware} of its personal, however that GPU is so stripped-down, you may’t virtually allow the cutting-edge lighting characteristic in video games. The RTX 3050, then again, handles ray tracing like a champ, particularly in video games that additionally help Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech.

Nvidia additionally gave the RTX 3050 an ordinary reminiscence configuration that can don’t have any drawback taking part in video games at 1080p right this moment or sooner or later. It comes with 8GB of GDDR working at 14Gbps, throughout a 128-bit bus. That’s good for 224GB per second of reminiscence bandwidth—slower than the RTX 3060’s 360GB/s over its wider bus, however nonetheless a-ok for the 1080p gaming this card is meant for. The additional reminiscence capability additionally helps with ray tracing, since flipping on that characteristic locations far more stress on a graphics card’s VRAM.

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AMD stripped out varied decoding and encoding capabilities from its price range GPU, whereas reducing the show outputs on the Radeon RX 6500 XT down to only singular HDMI and DisplayPort connections. That’s not the case with the RTX 3050, which comes with all the trendy encode/decode performance of different RTX 30-series GPUs (together with AV1 help) and a full complement of visible outputs. The EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black mannequin we’re reviewing right this moment comes with a single HDMI 2.1 port and a trio of DisplayPorts, together with a 8-pin energy connector.

Since the RTX 3050 comes with all of the {hardware} and software program as its different Nvidia siblings, simply in pared-down kind, which means it additionally helps Nvidia’s large ecosystem of killer software program options. Nvidia Broadcast, latency-lowering Nvidia Reflex, ShadowPlay, NVENC encoding, DLSS, Nvidia Image Scaling, all of it works. Hallelujah.

As with the RTX 3060, Nvidia isn’t rolling out one in every of its snazzy Founders Edition fashions for the RTX 3050. Instead, it’s counting on customized playing cards from companions to hold the load in right this moment’s scorching-hot graphics card market. The EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black despatched over for testing largely mirrors the design of the RTX 3060 XC Black we benchmarked before. This dual-slot graphics card sticks to reference specs and eschews cost-adding extras like a dual-BIOS swap or a backplate to assist it land at Nvidia’s $249 value level for the RTX 3050. The lack of a backplate makes the EVGA XC Black a little bit of an eyesore in an period when backplates have largely change into the norm, nevertheless it’s in any other case inoffensive aesthetically, with a blacked-out design.

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EVGA mistakenly loaded evaluation samples with a barely sooner BIOS supposed for a step-up overclock mannequin. Our unit is rated for a 1845MHz enhance clock, against the 1777MHz reference spec. That ought to solely transfer the efficiency needle by a pair share factors, EVGA says, however manufacturing items being shipped to retailer cabinets have the proper BIOS put in, with the proper speeds.

If you need to put the dual-axial followers to extra work in a bid to squeeze much more efficiency out of the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black, the corporate’s chic Precision X1 GPU management software incorporates every part it’s good to monitor and overclock the cardboard. The slickly designed program is one in every of our favorites.

And now the stage is ready. Let’s get to the benchmarks.

Our take a look at system

We take a look at graphics playing cards on an AMD Ryzen 5000-series take a look at rig in an effort to benchmark the impact of PCIe 4.0 help on trendy GPUs, in addition to the performance-boosting AMD Smart Access Memory and Nvidia Resizable BAR options (that are each primarily based on the identical underlying PCIe normal). Currently, we’re testing it on an open bench with AMD’s Wraith Max air cooler. Most of the {hardware} was supplied by the producers, however we bought the storage ourselves.

• AMD Ryzen 5900X, inventory settings
• AMD Wraith Max cooler
• MSI Godlike X570 motherboard
• 32GB G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4 3800 reminiscence
• EVGA 1200W SuperNova P2 energy provide
• 1TB SK Hynix Gold S31 SSD

We’re evaluating the $250 EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black towards its EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black cousin, and yesteryear’s RTX 2060 Founders Edition. On the AMD facet of issues, we’ve included the RTX 3050’s direct competitor, the $199 XFX Radeon RX 6500 XT Qick 210, together with the step-up XFX Radeon RX 6600 Swft 210 and Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6600 XT, plus the Radeon RX 5600 XT and 5700 from final technology.

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Again, EVGA mistakenly loaded evaluation samples of the RTX 3050 XC Black with a barely sooner BIOS supposed for a step-up overclock mannequin. Our unit is rated for a 1845MHz enhance clock, against the 1777MHz reference spec. Production items being shipped to retail cabinets have the proper BIOS put in, with the proper speeds. The efficiency outcomes proven beneath could also be a body or three sooner than what you’d get from this card in actual life in consequence, however there needs to be nothing tangibly completely different within the gaming expertise.

We take a look at quite a lot of video games spanning varied engines, genres, vendor sponsorships (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel), and graphics APIs (DirectX 11, DX12, and Vulkan). Each sport is examined utilizing its in-game benchmark on the highest attainable graphics presets until in any other case famous, with VSync, body charge caps, real-time ray tracing or picture upsampling results, and FreeSync/G-Sync disabled, together with every other vendor-specific applied sciences like FidelityFX instruments or Nvidia Reflex. PCIe Resizable BAR and AMD’s Smart Access Memory had been additionally disabled for testing. We’ve enabled temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) to push these playing cards to their limits. We run every benchmark a minimum of thrice and listing the common end result for every take a look at.

You’ll see the Radeon RX 6500 XT lagging laborious in a number of of those assessments, however the actuality is even uglier than it appears. AMD’s price range GPU additionally suffered from extreme lag spikes in a number of video games because of its barely-there 4GB of RAM and scant 64-bit bus. It runs effective at 1080p Medium or High settings, however the maxed-out graphics choices used on this testing are merely an excessive amount of for it, giving the RTX 3050 the clear edge.

Gaming efficiency benchmarks

Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion is among the first video games to debut on next-gen consoles. Ubisoft upgraded its Disrupt engine to incorporate cutting-edge options like real-time ray tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS. We disable these results for this testing, however Legion stays a strenuous sport even on high-end {hardware} with its non-compulsory high-resolution texture pack put in.

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Horizon Zero Dawn

Yep, PlayStation exclusives are coming to the PC now. Horizon Zero Dawn runs on Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine, the identical engine that powers Death Stranding.

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Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics places it personal brutal, fast-paced spin on the XCOM-like style. This Unreal Engine 4-powered sport was constructed from the bottom up for DirectX 12, and we love having the ability to work a tactics-style sport into our benchmarking suite. Better but, the sport comes with a plethora of graphics choices for PC snobs. More video games ought to commit such loving care to explaining what flipping all these visible knobs imply.

You can’t use the presets to benchmark Gears Tactics, because it intelligently scales to work greatest in your put in {hardware}, that means that “Ultra” on one graphics card can load completely different settings than “Ultra” on a weaker card. We manually set all choices to their highest attainable settings.

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Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is extra enjoyable when you may play cooperatively with a buddy, however it’s a fearless experiment—and an absolute technical showcase. Running on the Vulkan API, Youngblood achieves blistering body charges, and it helps all types of cutting-edge applied sciences like ray tracing, DLSS 2.0, HDR, GPU culling, asynchronous computing, and Nvidia’s Content Adaptive Shading. The sport features a built-in benchmark with two completely different scenes; we examined Riverside.

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Metro Exodus

One of the very best video games of 2019, Metro Exodus stays one of many best-looking video games round, too. The newest model of the 4A Engine gives extremely luscious, ultra-detailed visuals, with probably the most gorgeous real-time ray tracing implementations launched but. The Extreme graphics preset we benchmark can soften even essentially the most highly effective trendy {hardware}, as you’ll see beneath, although the sport’s Ultra and High presets nonetheless look good at a lot increased body charges. Bumping the settings all the way down to “just” Ultra basically doubles body charges.

We take a look at in DirectX 12 mode with ray tracing, Hairworks, and DLSS disabled. The Radeon RX 6500 XT refused to run at our take a look at settings in any respect, therefore the zero rating.

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Borderlands 3

Borderlands is again! Gearbox’s sport defaults to DX12, so we do as nicely. It offers us a glimpse on the ultra-popular Unreal Engine 4’s efficiency in a standard shooter. This sport tends to favor AMD {hardware}.

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Strange Brigade

Strange Brigade is a cooperative third-person shooter the place a crew of adventurers blasts by way of hordes of mythological enemies. It’s a technological showcase, constructed across the next-gen Vulkan and DirectX 12 applied sciences and infused with options like HDR help and the flexibility to toggle asynchronous compute on and off. It makes use of Rebellion’s customized Azure engine. We take a look at utilizing the Vulkan renderer, which is quicker than DX12.

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Total War: Troy

The newest sport within the well-liked Total War saga, Troy was given away free for its first 24 hours on the Epic Games Store, transferring over 7.5 million copies earlier than it went on correct sale. Total War: Troy is constructed utilizing a modified model of the Total War: Warhammer 2 engine, and this DX11 title seems to be gorgeous for a turn-based technique sport. We take a look at the extra intensive battle benchmark.

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F1 2020

F1 2020 is a gem to check, supplying a big selection of each graphical and benchmarking choices, making it a way more dependable (and enjoyable) possibility that the Forza sequence. It’s constructed on the newest model of Codemasters’ buttery-smooth Ego sport engine, full with help for DX12 and Nvidia’s DLSS know-how. We take a look at two laps on the Australia course, with clear skies on and DLSS off.

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Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider concludes the reboot trilogy, and it’s nonetheless totally beautiful. Square Enix optimized this sport for DX12 and recommends DX11 provided that you’re utilizing older {hardware} or Windows 7, so we take a look at with DX12. Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes use of an enhanced model of the Foundation engine that additionally powered Rise of the Tomb Raider and contains non-compulsory real-time ray tracing and DLSS options.

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Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Six Siege nonetheless dominates the Steam charts years after its launch, and Ubisoft helps it with frequent updates and occasions. The builders have poured a ton of labor into the sport’s AnvilNext engine over time, ultimately rolling out a Vulkan model of the sport that we use to check. By default, the sport lowers the render scaling to extend body charges, however we set it to 100 p.c to benchmark native rendering efficiency on graphics playing cards. Even nonetheless, body charges soar.

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Ray tracing efficiency

We additionally benchmarked the GeForce RTX 3050 in a handful of titles that help cutting-edge real-time ray tracing results. While the newer Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs now help ray tracing, older AMD fashions don’t.

Nvidia holds a key benefit in ray-traced video games because of its Deep Learning Super Sampling know-how (DLSS), which leverages AI tensor cores embedded in RTX GPUs to internally render video games at a decrease decision, then up-res them to your required decision utilizing machine studying to fill within the gaps. DLSS 2.0 works like black magic and provides Nvidia a powerful lead in ray-tracing efficiency. Without it, you often can’t run ray-traced video games above 1080p decision.

AMD gives its personal FidelityFX Super Resolution to attain the identical fundamental perform, nevertheless it makes use of completely different underlying know-how with no reliance on AI or devoted {hardware}. Both DLSS and FSR solely work in video games that help them, nevertheless, so our benchmarks beneath solely present efficiency with ray tracing enabled however no DLSS or FSR. It wouldn’t be truthful to AMD, as these video games all help DLSS alone. Flip these options on in suitable video games and also you’ll see body charges soar. Testing with out upsampling energetic additionally offers us a glimpse into the uncooked ray tracing efficiency chops for these GPUs.

We plan to develop our ray-traced sport suite quickly, however for now we’re giving Watch Dogs: Legion, Metro: Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider a whirl to place the capabilities to the take a look at, with ray tracing choices set to Ultra in every title. Legion packs ray-traced reflections, Tomb Raider contains ray-traced shadows, and Metro options extra strenuous (and mood-enhancing) ray-traced international illumination. Spoiler: It doesn’t go nicely for the $199 Radeon RX 6500 XT and its uncommon technical configuration.

Let’s kick issues off with Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s ray-traced shadows.

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Metro: Exodus makes use of ray tracing for international illumination. The Radeon RX 6500 XT refused to run at our take a look at settings, therefore the zero rating. We take a look at at maxed-out settings, however dropping the visible preset down from “Extreme” to “Ultra” and flipping on DLSS would significantly enhance efficiency on this sport from a sensible standpoint.

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Watch Dogs: Legion hammers your system no matter whether or not you will have ray tracing on, a minimum of with the high-resolution texture pack put in. Activating the ray-traced reflections exacerbates the difficulty. Just ask the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

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Bottom line? While the inclusion of ray accelerators within the Radeon RX 6500 XT gave AMD the prospect to crow about being the primary sub-$200 graphics card to help ray tracing, our assessments present that you just wouldn’t truly need to sport on that card with ray tracing on. The GeForce RTX 3050 runs laps round its rival.

Power draw, thermals, and noise

We take a look at energy draw by looping the F1 2020 benchmark at 4K for about 20 minutes after we’ve benchmarked every part else and noting the best studying on our Watts Up Pro meter, which measures the facility consumption of our complete take a look at system. The preliminary a part of the race, the place all competing automobiles are onscreen concurrently, tends to be essentially the most demanding portion. 

This isn’t a worst-case take a look at; it is a GPU-bound sport working at a GPU-bound decision to gauge efficiency when the graphics card is sweating laborious. If you’re taking part in a sport that additionally hammers the CPU, you could possibly see increased general system energy attracts. Consider your self warned.

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No complaints right here. The GeForce RTX 3050 merely doesn’t want a variety of energy to do work. Nvidia’s Ampere structure isn’t fairly as environment friendly as AMD’s rival RDNA 2 design, as peering carefully at this outcomes point out, nevertheless it doesn’t matter this far down the GPU stack.

We take a look at thermals by leaving GPU-Z open through the F1 2020 energy draw take a look at, noting the best most temperature on the finish.

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Again, no complaints right here. EVGA’s XC Black cooler could lack frills, nevertheless it certain will get the job completed, and it stays good and quiet (although not fairly inaudible) doing it.

Should you purchase the GeForce RTX 3050?

If yow will discover the GeForce RTX 3050 for near its $250 MSRP, completely. In right this moment’s promote it’d nonetheless be a relative steal at $300 to $350 (sigh), regardless that the GTX 1650 launched at $150, and the 3050 is just a bit sooner than the GTX 1660 Ti that launched at $280 final technology (and is at present promoting for $400 to $475 used on Ebay, double sigh). The GTX playing cards lacked ray tracing or DLSS capabilities, nevertheless.

We’re not in 2019 anymore although. The GeForce RTX 3050 is a superb 1080p graphics card in these making an attempt occasions, able to chewing by way of video games at 60-plus frames per second or increased at 1080p decision even with all visible bells and whistles often enabled. (You could have to bump some settings all the way down to High in particularly strenuous video games.) It completely smashes AMD’s $199 rival Radeon RX 6500 XT. That goes doubly so in ray-traced video games, the place the AMD card struggles to attain body charges within the single digits with out the assistance of picture upsampling. Gross. The GeForce RTX 3050’s ample 8GB reminiscence buffer and help for killer Nvidia options like Reflex, Broadcast, and DLSS solely sweeten the pot. The GeForce RTX 3050 delivers every part you’d need from a contemporary 1080p graphics card, from quick body charges to completely loaded options.

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But what PC players actually need is to have the ability to purchase graphics playing cards at sane costs. That hasn’t occurred in nicely over a yr. The jury stays out on whether or not Nvidia will have the ability to maintain the RTX 3050 in higher provide than its different GPUs over the weeks and months to come back, however I’m much less optimistic right here than I’m with AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT.

The GeForce RTX 3050 runs laps round AMD’s providing, however the extreme compromises AMD made whereas constructing the Radeon RX 6500 XT means it has an opportunity of evading the attention of crypto miners, whereas its ultra-tiny GPU die additionally lets AMD pump out a lot of chips. The GeForce RTX 3050, then again, sticks to an ordinary reminiscence configuration that can be utilized to mine Ethereum, and makes use of a cut-down model of the large GA106 die discovered within the RTX 3060. Yes, crypto costs have plummeted in latest days and Nvidia outfitted the RTX 3050 with anti-mining Lite Hash Rate technology, however that’s been crushed earlier than. And the RTX 3050’s GPU is over 2.5x bigger than the Radeon’s die, which implies AMD can squeeze many, many extra chips out of a wafer.

We’ll see it the way it goes. If the RTX 3050 disappears from retailers and pops up on Ebay for 1.5x to 2x its MSRP like each different trendy GPU has, it’s lots much less interesting. But in the event you can rating one for $250 to $300 in right this moment’s wild market, snatch it up pronto. There’s nothing else on this value vary—new or used—that may hold with it, particularly the Radeon RX 6500 XT.