Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti review: faster than 2080 Super, easily beats 1080 Ti - Eurogamer.net

The rumours were true: the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a real graphics card, and we've been testing it for the past week.

Nvidia promises RTX 2080 Super level performance in a smaller, cheaper and more efficient Ampere design, and - spoiler alert - that's exactly what our testing shows they've delivered.

As well as improvements to compute performance, all of the usual features of Nvidia's Ampere architecture are present and correct, including next-generation ray tracing and tensor cores, so we can expect more noticeable performance uplifts in RT and AI accelerated workloads.

We've covered Ampere in more detail in our earlier RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 reviews, so let's move onto the card's physical design.

As usual, we're testing the Founders Edition of the card, which comes with the same gorgeous industrial design and in the same compact dimensions as the RTX 3070.

We have two axial fans in a 'flow-through' configuration, with the small, pennant-shaped motherboard design and miniature 12-pin power connector allowing the final third of the card to be wholly used for cooling.

As with other RTX 30-series cards, the 3060 Ti is a PCIe 4.0 device but works in PCIe 3.0 motherboards without any loss in performance in the vast majority of gaming workloads.

AV1 support isn't essential now, and is available on both AMD and Nvidia's new cards, but it could be a nice cherry on top for anyone choosing to upgrade once it hits the mainstream.

One of the biggest questions we had when testing the 3060 Ti - beyond its gaming performance, which we'll get to soon - surrounded its power efficiency.

The RTX 3070 was substantially more efficient than its more powerful siblings, so is the 3060 Ti more efficient still?

To answer this question, we use Nvidia's Power Capture Analysis Tool, or PCAT.

This is an interposer board that sits between the PCIe slot and the graphics card, as well as between the supplementary 8-pin power input used by the 3060 Ti and our power supply.

This way, we can measure the number of watts drawn by the card itself, rather than the load of the full system which can vary naturally over time, and plot this power draw precisely against frame-rates to get a sense of how much power is being used to create each frame.

In Death Stranding, the RTX 3060 Ti almost equals the RTX 3070, requiring 3.064 joules per frame to render our test scene compared to 2.915 joules per frame for the 3070.

AMD's Big Navi graphics cards perform better in Death Stranding than Nvidia's Ampere, so we see an even better efficiency rating for the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT.

So the 3060 Ti does use less power than the 3070, but the decrease in performance is larger than the decrease in power usage - at least in this test.

Gears 5 is more hopeful, with the 3060 Ti setting a new record here of 3.163 joules per frame, with the 3070 requiring 14 per cent more power per frame and the RX 6800 requiring around 20 per cent more.

Normally we'd expect cards in the same family to be arranged in the same order in each game, so it's unusual to see the 3060 Ti lead against the 3070 in one test and trail in another.

However, retests bore out our initial results, allowing the 3060 Ti to claim the 'most efficient Ampere GPU' title in at least one game.

It's worth looking back at the RTX 2070 FE as well, which requires 50 per cent more joules for each frame - Ampere and its shift to 8nm has really had solid results in terms of power efficiency.

With our brief power testing concluded, it's time to confirm the specifications of our test rig.