1080p gaming performance

download (5).jpg

The RTX 3060 Ti could be seen as a great GPU for high refresh rate gaming at 1080p. There's not too much wasted resource in colossal memory buffers and the like, and so you get a decent blend of performance and cost.

That's pretty clear once again from the benchmarks, which see the RTX 3060 Ti sitting comfortably ahead of the RTX 2080 Super in all but F1 2020, which seemingly adores both Turing and the RX 6800-series cards. It'll be interesting to see how this one shakes out with, what can only be, the inevitable RX 6700-series competition from the red team. But all in good time.

For now, the RTX 3060 Ti carves out a heap of 1080p performance, and even closes in on the RTX 3070 in a couple of games.

Ray tracing performance

download (6).jpg

The Nvidia Ampere architecture comes with second generation RT Cores, and third generation Tensor Cores, with the Volta architecture initially introducing those AI accelerators way back when. It's clearly a superior approach by a decent degree over the previous Turing acceleration, and obviously against the Radeon version too, and that goes a long way to explaining how the RTX 3060 Ti with just 38 RT Cores can outperform the RTX 2080 Super with 48 RT Cores.

It's pretty close, but with a slight rasterised performance edge in the RTX games we've tested above, and the improvements to Ampere's RT acceleration, the RTX 3060 Ti comes out way on top.

The RTX 3060 Ti's ray tracing performance also goes a long way to raising the floor for overall ray tracing performance, with a significant advantage over the RTX 2060 Super with 34 (Gen 1) RT Cores.

Power and thermal

download (7).jpg

There's not much about the RTX 3060 Ti that's particularly surprising, and the fact it's the most power efficient GPU of the RTX 30-series so far doesn't really change thing. With a 200W TDP, the RTX 3060 Ti occasionally sucks upwards of 232W from the PSU, but mostly maintains a steady gait at 200W or a little less.

That puts it ahead of the RTX 3070 by just a touch in performance per watt at 1080p, and in line with the rest of Ampere at 4K. That's notably off the performance per watt of AMD's RX 6800 and RDNA 2, which could give AMD a little more leeway when it comes to eventual RX 6700-series SKUs, should they show up anytime soon.

Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti verdict

Once again we're looking at a solid generational leap from Nvidia's Ampere generation, and the RTX 3060 Ti delivers superb performance across a heady mix of rasterised and ray-traced games. If you're looking for a steady 60fps or more in the latest, most demanding games, then it's got you covered. If you want a little more more out of 1080p, you're sorted well into high refresh rate territory.

And if you hope for 60fps at 4K, that's attainable with only marginal sacrifices to graphics settings. Just what you might expect from an RTX 3060 Ti, no doubt.

Nvidia has also made significant gains in its mission to quash any and all frame rate sacrifice associated with true-to-life reflections and dynamic global lighting. There's undoubtedly still a performance hit from switching ray tracing on, but Nvidia's new and improved RT Cores, along with DLSS in many cases, takes some of the oomph out of the swing.

And that's an important thing to note as we head into PC gaming's third year of ray tracing (yes, it's been that long!). There's already a far more expansive library of ray tracing compatible titles than when Nvidia first launched the RTX suite back in 2018, and it's sure to only grow with AMD, and AMD-powered consoles from Sony and Microsoft, now supporting ray tracing acceleration on-chip.

The same can be said for DLSS. The feature is become slightly more widespread in today's most played games, and it's becoming an especially useful tool for not only acting as counterweight to the ray tracing performance impact, but actually as a tool for reducing render load at high resolutions—a lot of the time on GPUs that materially don't have the guts to make it work.

The RTX 3060 Ti is such a card. While it dabbles in high-fidelity 4K gaming, some graphics settings need to be reduced in order to really crack a solid 60fps in more demanding games. And that's often just in terms of average framerates, to keep your GPU steadily above 60fps may require quite a bit of tinkering. That can sometimes take the fun out of 4K gaming in the first place, the supposed high level of detail.

So while DLSS is far from a universal solution, it's a surprisingly not all that lossy way to hit those all-important performance figures for smooth gaming. DLSS has come on leaps and bounds since its first introduction, and in most games it's not something that detracts from the visual or gaming experience in any tangible way.

And it's these extra features—ray tracing, DLSS, Reflex, and even Nvidia Broadcast—that generate quite a bit of my interest in the RTX 3060 Ti today beyond its rasterised performance. There's a solid base of genuinely great features behind RTX and the Nvidia package that's only been improved upon with Ampere, none more so than the ray tracing performance for that matter.

That's not to say AMD doesn't offer its fair share of alternatives in FidelityFX and Radeon Anti-Lag. But we're yet to see an AMD alternative to the supersampling feature, although one is confirmed to be on the way at some point next year in FidelityFX Super Resolution. And, while ray tracing is no longer an Nvidia-only experience with the introduction of the RX 6800-series, it is an area where the green team is dominating performance graphs.

The same goes for a direct competitor to the RTX 3060 Ti—we don't know when it will arrive, but you can be sure that one will. Likely under the RX 6700-series banner.

And that's a common footing we find ourselves in with Nvidia's launches so far this generation—the company has materialised graphics cards ahead of AMD's comparative lineup, and that means that we won't truly know if AMD's got a trick up its sleeve to compete with the RTX 3060 Ti until likely early next year.

But that doesn't change a thing in my mind right now. It's not all Nvidia vs. AMD, you know, and frankly whether there's an answer to the RTX 3060 Ti in a few months or not, you shouldn't have any regrets in choosing this graphics card for your next big PC rebuild.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous when you look at generational gains over even the RTX 20-series—next to the 10-series it's quite frightening, actually. There's exceptional 1080p and 1440p performance in a tiny package here, the likes of which would've set you back something close to twice as much cash only last year. And that's pretty great.

There's just the small potential issue of availability, that which has similarly loomed over all the other RTX 30-series launches to date. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but judging by every tech launch this year (not only Nvidia's, and not only graphics cards), stock may be sparsely found for the RTX 3060 Ti at launch due to immense demand for new silicon right now.

Global availability for the RTX 3060 Ti begins December 2, 2020, and I suspect you'll want to be ready to go, front and centre, if you want to have any hope of picking up this graphics card on launch day, or likely anytime before 2021. And given the price and performance of this mid-range Ampere card, it will be worth getting in line for.