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

By Aaron Yip - 6 Dec 2020

Benchmark and Performance

Test Setup

 

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

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.

Image: NVIDIA

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.

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9.5
  • Performance 9
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 9.5
The Good
Excellent 1440p performance
Form factor makes it suitable for mini PC builds
Attractive price
Low TDP
The Bad
Awkward power connector position
Extreme shortages of stock
Required cable adapter
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