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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.
As we often saw, the 1440p data is even more brutal for the 6500 XT. Here the RTX 3050 was 54% faster, or 85% faster when comparing PCIe 3.0 performance. The RTX 3050 also averaged 74 fps, meaning it was more often than not good for over 60 fps at 1440p using respectable quality settings in many titles. Ray Tracing Performance The 6500 XT does crumble at 1440p, whereas the RTX 3050 remains strong, turning in over 60 fps on average to make it 42% 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
Graphics Features
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. 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. 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. That said, it would also be much worse value than the GTX 1650 Super and slightly worse than the RX 5600 XT, but that's to be expected given the current market, so we can accept a little bit of stagnation, even if we don't like it. 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?
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. 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.
How much VRAM does the RTX 3050 have?
Whereas the 6500 XT dropped performance by 13% with PCIe 3.0, we see no change for the RTX 3050. So gamers limited to a PCIe 3.0 platform (which as of writing is likely a majority), the RTX 3050 is going to be significantly faster. 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.
The RTX 3050 had no issue crushing that result with 225 fps on average, making it just 11% slower than the RTX 2060 and 14% faster than the GTX 1660 Super. Unbelievably, it was 92% faster than the 6500 XT, and let's not even bother with the PCIe 3.0 result for that GPU. 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. The same was true of the RX 6500 XT, with FidelityFX Super Resolution, too. But its severely restricted frame buffer means game performance is still pretty weak even with FSR enabled. It's also not as effective a solution as Nvidia's hardware-based DLSS tech. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Next up we have Death Stranding, and this is another game that isn't terribly demanding, despite looking quite nice. The GTX 3050 was good for 108 fps using the default quality preset at 1080p and that placed it directly between the 1660 Super and GTX 2060, a great result.
The RTX 3050 rendered 112 fps on average in Hitman 3 using the medium quality preset at 1080p and that placed it very close to the RTX 2060, while beating the GTX 1660 Super by a 23% margin. It was also 29% faster than the 6500 XT, or 42% faster when restricted to PCIe 3.0. Turning on ray tracing with the medium quality setting + DLSS dropped the average frame rate to 60 fps, which is still very playale, but personally I'd rather play the game with a higher quality preset and perhaps leave DLSS enabled. 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.
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