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Nvidia RTX 3060 review: A fine $329 GPU, but ho-hum among the 3000 series - Ars Technica

Nvidia RTX 3060 review: A fine $329 GPU, but ho-hum among the 3000 series - Ars Technica

Nvidia RTX 3060 review: A fine $329 GPU, but ho-hum among the 3000 series - Ars Technica
Feb 25, 2021 1 min, 26 secs

I say all of this up front about the Nvidia RTX 3060, going on sale today, February 25 (at 12pm ET, if you're interested in entering the day-one sales fray) because it's the first Nvidia GPU I've tested in a while to make my cautious stance easier.

Ahead of today's review, Nvidia provided Ars Technica with an EVGA version of the RTX 3060, since this model won't receive an Nvidia "Founders Edition" label (the first for any mainline RTX card).

The RTX 3060 has over 150 percent of the 2060 Super's CUDA cores, along with 150 percent of the GDDR6 VRAM and a slight lead in core clocks.

Plus, comparing each card's proprietary "RTX" potential by counting tensor cores and RT cores is tricky, since the RTX 3060 has fewer cores than the RTX 2060 Super in both counts, albeit "newer" generations of each.

My first question mark came when I saw the RTX 2060 Super beat the RTX 3060 in a variety of 3DMark benchmarks.

The older card enjoyed a performance lead as high as 6.5 percent in a straightforward GPU muscle test ("Fire Strike Ultra"), and it even bested the newer card, however marginally, in a head-to-head 3DMark ray-tracing showdown.

With this knowledge in hand, I grabbed an Nvidia benchmark table provided to members of the press, which aligned with most of my other tests—albeit with results that were a bit more charitable to the newer RTX 3060 than my own.

Where Nvidia found that The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 (ray tracing disabled) were "dead even" between the 3060 and the 2060 Super as tested in 4K resolution, my personal, repeatable benchmarks gave the older card a lead.

Grand Theft Auto V, which runs a scant 2.9 percent faster on the 2060 Super in 4K, doesn't appear in Nvidia's provided benchmark table.

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