NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review: NVIDIA’s “one more thing” is an impressive performer

Note: This review was first published on 1 Dec 2020.

Introduction

When NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, one notable absence was an entry-tier model. While the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 were targeted at the high-end and mid-level gaming segments, there wasn’t a model that hit the wider and price-sensitive mass market. Enter the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

Rumours of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti have started swirling since the launch of its more powerful siblings, and the surprise isn’t so much about the appearance of an RTX 3060 GPU but an RTX 3060 with a Ti moniker. If you’re familiar with NVIDIA GPUs, the “Ti” branding is typically used to mark the company’s slightly higher-end cards. So, is this a hint of two things to come – a non-Ti RTX 3060 and Ti versions of RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 GPUs soon? Your guess is as good as mine.

At US$399, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition directly supersedes the last-gen GeForce RTX 2060 Super Founders Edition and while its 4864 CUDA cores is twice the count of the latter’s, it shares some similar specifications. Here’s a quick comparison of both the new and old cards:

More than the above specifications, the RTX 3060 Ti also sports the same technologies featured in the other RTX 30-series GPUs such as RTX IO, and NVIDIA Reflex. We have covered these in separate articles previously, so I highly recommend that you read them to find out how games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War take advantage of these features if you own an RTX 30-series graphics card.

Looks-wise, there’s very little to differentiate the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition from the RTX 3070 Founders Edition apart from its silver-coloured chassis, as opposed to the "space grey" found on its older RTX 30-series siblings. It sports the same short PCB (compared to partners’ cards), a traditional cooling system where a dual-fan system cools the heatsinks and even the same 12-pin power connector. In short, it boasts the same impeccable build quality and I’ve said it before – and will say it again – that the enclosed, one-piece block design really feels better made than most custom cards on the market.

If you’re looking to build an entry to mid-tier gaming system with a mini-ITX casing in mind, the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition’s diminutive size (242mm long) and low power (200W) draw makes it an appealing option – perhaps a little more so than the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, which has a higher power draw of 220W. For display outputs, the new card is no different from the rest of the RTX 30-series Founders Edition, sporting the same single HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

Hit the next page to see how the card fares in our performance benchmarks.

Test Setup

The setup for the test rig used hasn't changed since our last graphics card review and comes with the following specifications:

• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU
• MSI MEG X570 Godlike
• Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
• Windows 10 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift PG43UQ 4K Gaming Monitor

I've picked two cards from our GeForce RTX 20-series Founders Edition stable; the RTX 2060 Super, because it is the card the RTX 3060 Ti has been designated to supersede after all, and the RTX 2080 Super as well, because NVIDIA has claimed (at a media session) that the new card is more than capable of holding up with it. So it will be interesting to see some comparison numbers here.

Last but not least, I've also included the RTX 3070 Founders Edition. There's a price difference of US$100 between the two cards, so it will be interesting to have a gauge on the performance gap between it and the RX 3060 Ti. Does topping up the difference makes the RTX 3070 a better option? Let's find out.

Games used for benchmarking

Here’s a list of the tool and games that I’ve chosen to benchmark all cards. The game genres were purposely varied to give us a sense of how the cards perform across a wide range of titles: shooters, action, strategy games, etc.

• 3DMark (Synthetic Benchmark)
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Total War: Three Kingdoms (Battle)
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Metro: Exodus
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
• Gears 5

All four cards were benchmarked using the unreleased (as of writing) ForceWare 457.40.

3DMark

3DMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

The chart above shows performance normalcy with the RTX 3060 Ti performing behind the quicker RTX 3070. Unsurprisingly, it outperforms the RTX 2060 Super convincingly and even edges out the RTX 2080 Super. But synethic benchmarks only tell one small part of the story. Let's look at the cards' real-world performance in games. 

Looking at the numbers across the three most common resolutions, there are some interesting takeaways. For one, it's a foregone conclusion that the RTX 2060 Super simply cannot match up to the RTX 3060 Ti. It's not even a close fight. With the RTX 2080 Super, however, it's interesting to see how a last-gen graphics card that's only second to the RTX 2080 Ti could not outpace the lower-rung RTX 3060 Ti at all.

That's a pretty massive upgrade and speaks volume about the silicon engine under the Ampere architecture's hood (the architecture behind all RTX 30-series GPUs). NVIDIA certainly wasn't joking, when they claimed Ampere architecture is a giant leap in performance over the previous generation Turing's.

How did NVIDIA do it? The NVIDIA Ampere architecture Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) is the building block of the GPU, and it’s full of different Cores and Units and memory. One of the big changes in the NVIDIA

Ampere architecture SM is with 32-bit floating point (FP32) throughput. Well, NVIDIA doubled it. To accomplish this, they designed a new data path for FP32 and INT32 operations, which results in all four partitions combined executing 128 FP32 operations per clock.

Does this help gaming? As you can see from the above charts, pretty much so. Graphics and compute operations and algorithms rely on FP32 executions, and so do modern shader workloads. Ray tracing

denoising shaders benefit from FP32 speedups, too. The heavier the ray tracing rendering workload, the bigger the performance gains relative to the previous generation - e.g., the RTX 3060 Ti versus the RTX 2060 Super.

In summary

What's captivating about the RTX 3060 Ti is that it didn't just beat and replaced the RTX 2060 Super as this generation's entry-tier graphics card, but also delivering more performance than the previous-generation top-of-the-line RTX 2080 Super (and by that measure, the RTX 2080 too) that was priced at US$699. There's so much performance leap with the Ampere architecture that it's quite unbelievable - reminiscent of how the Pascal architecture leapfrogged Maxwell's.

And that the RTX 3060 Ti did all these for US$399 is even more jaw-dropping. I remembered saying how the RTX 3070 (US$499) was the sweet spot for 1440p gaming and is likely to spell the beginning of the end for the aged 1080p resolution. Well, guess what? The RTX 3060 looks like its an even more attractive buy thanks to the US$100 savings. While the RTX 3070 is still the better performer overall, at 1440p both cards can be said to actually be on par especially for new games such as Watch Dog Legion and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. I mean, seriously, when your card is achieving 104fps in the latter game, do you really need it to run at 111fps?

Conversely, if we look at the higher 4K resolution, you'll have to pare down games' visual settings in order to achieve playable frame rates. It's not just the RTX 3060 Ti, but the RTX 3070 struggles at that resolution too. For 4K gaming, the RTX 3080 (if you're in the NVIDIA camp) is still your best bet, while the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 cards are really catered for the 1440p segment instead.

The RTX 3070 was already a great mid-level graphics card, but the RTX 3060 Ti is testament to NVIDIA's ability to deliver impressive performance with its range of RTX 30-series GPUs. Just imagine having to shell out nearly twice the price for this level of performance just a few months ago. That said, the RTX 3060 Ti has somewhat taken the shine off the RTX 3070; there's literally no scenario that we've tested where the RTX 3070 delivers a better real-world experience other than just an increase in frame rates for the sake of numbers. Also, note that both SKUs come with 8GB of graphics memory.

If I was building a 1440p with a tight budget in mind or a small gaming PC (e.g., with a mini-ITX casing), I'd definitely pick the RTX 3060 Ti - it's performance-to-value makes it an absolute bargain. Plus, as tested, you would net RTX 3070 levels of gaming experience, but at US$100 less. How does the RTX 3060 Ti stock level and pricing translate locally? Stay tuned to more reporting and partner card reviews from us coming soon.

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