GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3050 (8GB)
There's no denying that the ongoing semiconductor shortage has made it a challenging time to get your hands on a new GPU. Even if you can, you're often forced to pay well over the recommended retail price for it, with demand heavily outweighing available supply and thus creating a lucrative market for some unwelcome price gouging. It's what makes new releases of GPUs, such as the RTX 3050, so tricky. On paper, the latest graphics card from Nvidia delivers--it's a good GPU for 1080p gaming at high refresh rates, with the bonus of ray tracing and DLSS support. But if you can't find it for the price it's meant to be sold at, does that even matter anymore?
The RTX 3050 sits at the bottom of Nvidia's current line of new GPUs, positioned as this generation's budget card alongside significantly more expensive options such as the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070. It's evident that the price cut comes with its own share of concessions made on the hardware side. The GA106 GPU that the RTX 3050 uses is a slightly smaller version of the one in the RTX 3060, suggesting that Nvidia is making economical use of silicon it previously might have kept off shelves. That said, you're not going to get close to the same performance, even with the 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM that is shared between the two tiers of cards.
Technical details
For starters, the RTX 3050 limits its memory to a 128-bit bus, drastically reducing its effective memory bandwidth to just 224GBps. This comes into play when trying to hit higher frame rates at 1440p, where the available memory on offer hits the mark but just doesn't have the raw speed to keep up. Elsewhere, the 2560 CUDA cores and 12 billion transistors initially make the RTX 3050 sound more like a replacement for the RTX 2060 from last generation, but its much lower Tensor Core count and effective memory bandwidth keep it well behind in real-world applications.
RTX 3050 | RTX 2060 | GTX 1060 Ti | |
CUDA Cores | 2560 | 1920 | 1280 |
RT Cores | 20 | 30 | N/A |
Tensor Cores | 80 | 240 | N/A |
ROPs | 32 | 48 | 48 |
Boost Clock | 1777MHz | 1680MHz | 1709MHz |
Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR |
Bus | 128-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit |
Bandwidth | 224 GB/s | 336 GB/s | 192.2 GB/s |
TDP | 130W | 160W | 120W |
Launch Price | $250 | $350 | $300 |
That isn't to say that the addition of both Tensor and RT cores should be overlooked, especially if you're planning to upgrade from an older GTX 1060. These are the bits of hardware that make ray tracing and DLSS possible, both of which are big features for a budget card. While ray tracing performance does require some sacrifices in other graphical settings (more on this later), it's DLSS that continues to be the biggest benefit to even the weakest cards in Nvidia's Ampere lineup. The RTX 3050 slightly outdoes the raw performance of older cards such as the GTX 1660 Ti (which we didn't have to test ourselves), you'll be able to get more out of it for longer thanks to the performance DLSS can claw back, even if you're just running games at 1080p.
The RTX 3050 doesn't feature a reference design from Nvidia, so the one we were supplied with for testing comes from Gigabyte. This RTX 3050 OC Gaming Edition is a dual-slot card, featuring a triple-fan design that is overkill for the 130W TDP of the card, even at its boost clocks. The design features a premium look, however, with a nice metal backplate and a cut-out over the furthest fan down the card to allow air to get flung upwards into your chassis for better airflow (a design Nvidia has been using on its own Founder's Edition cards).
The over-engineered cooling does mean the RTX 3050 stayed whisper-quiet during testing, never going over 76 degrees Celsius on the core when stressed to its limit. The card also features a 0RPM fan mode when the GPU is idle, which is a nice touch in a budget offering. There's even a splash of RGB with an illuminated and addressable Gigabyte logo on the side of the card for traditional mounting.
Methodology and test bench
Performance is where the real strengths and inescapable weaknesses of the RTX 3050 come to bear, especially if you're hoping for a GPU that will power your gaming at 1440p for the foreseeable future. The short of it is that this new card is more suited to 1080p gaming in most respects, especially when you're looking to run the most modern titles at above 60fps. The good news is that, on that playing field, it does remarkably well, as results in graphically demanding titles such as Forza Horizon 5, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, and more show.
Our testing took place in the same machine as the one used for the RTX 3080 Ti (although we won't be comparing results to that card, for obvious reasons). Because we didn't have access to either the RTX 2060 or AMD's latest budget offering, the RX 5600 XT, we couldn't do comparisons to those either, but a GTX 1060 we did have on hand offers some context into the performance gains you can expect if you missed out on Nvidia's last generation of GPUs. Testing was done on the following system:
- MSI Mortar B550M Motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core/12-thread CPU clocked at 4.65GHz
- Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler
- Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200, CL16 RAM (2x16GB dual-channel DIMMs)
- Corsair Hxi Series HX850i (80mPlus Platinum) PSU
- Intel 660p 2TB NVMe SSD
Testing was done across numerous titles, both modern and slightly older, all of which allowed us to test features such as ray tracing, DLSS, and more. These include Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition, Borderlands 3, Gears Tactics, Forza Horizon 5, and Hitman 3.
