Nvidia RTX 3050 Review ft. Gigabyte and Palit

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RTX 3050 Eagle3. Palit RTX 3050 StormX OC4. Testing Methodology5. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Cyberpunk 20778. Death Stranding9. Far Cry 610. Forza Horizon 511. Hitman 312. Horizon Zero Dawn13. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy14. Red Dead Redemption 215. Resident Evil Village16. Total War Saga: Troy17. Watch Dogs: Legion18. PCIe 4.0 vs PCIe 3.0 Investigation19. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)20. Ray Tracing21. The DLSS Difference22. Cost Per Frame Analysis23. Gigabyte Eagle Vs Palit StormX OC24. Clock Speed25. GPU Temperatures26. Acoustics27. Noise-Normalised Temperatures28. Power Draw: 1080p29. Power Draw: 1440p30. Performance per Watt: 1080p31. Performance per Watt: 1440p32. Total System Power Draw33. Overclocking34. Closing Thoughts35. View All Pages

Just a week on from the disastrous launch of AMD's RX 6500 XT, today we are checking out something I sincerely hope will be… better. It's admittedly a low bar to clear, but I am of course talking about Nvidia's RTX 3050 – the company's first RTX GPU in the sub-£300 price bracket, arriving with a $249/£239 MSRP.

Officially unveiled back at CES 2022, the RTX 3050 is an important milestone for Nvidia. When it first debuted RTX technology with the 20-series, the most affordable GPU was the RTX 2060, priced at a not-inconsiderable £329. For the RTX 3050, the MSRP is set at £239, and while we know that figure is almost certainly somewhat detached from reality, it's still going to be interesting to see exactly what an ‘entry level' RTX graphics card looks like in 2022.

Unlike on the mobile side, where Nvidia has a dedicated GA107 GPU for RTX 3050/3050 Ti mobile chips, for the RTX 3050 the company is re-using its GA106 GPU, making it – in essence – a cut-down RTX 3060. Is it enough to stand out from 12 months of mediocre product launches? We're about to find out…

GPU	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 3060	RTX 3050
SMs	68	46	38	28	20
CUDA Cores	8704	5888	4864	3584	2560
Tensor Cores	272	184	152	112	80
RT Cores	68	46	38	28	20
Texture Units	272	184	152	112	80
ROPs	96	96	80	48	32
GPU Boost Clock	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1665 MHz	1777 MHz	1777 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15 Gbps	14 Gbps
Total Video Memory	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	360 GB/sec	224 GB/sec
PCIe Interface	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x8
TGP	320W	220W	200W	170W	130W

As a cut-down GA106 GPU, the RTX 3050 sports a total of 20 streaming multiprocessors (SMs).Thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving a total of 2560.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 20 RT cores and180 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 80 texture units, and 32 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 2 GPCs in total for RTX 3050.

Rated clock speed is carried over from the RTX 3060, as we find the same 1777MHz boost clock. Of the two cards we are looking at today, the Gigabyte Eagle ships with reference clocks, while the Palit StormX OC sees this increased by 30MHz out of the box.

Memory is provided by 8GB of GDDR6, clocked at 14Gbps. Over the narrower 128-bit memory interface, we see total memory bandwidth hit 224 GB/s, a reduction of 38% against the RTX 3060. The PCIe interface has also been shaved down, with a PCIe 4.0 x8 connection, instead of the full x16 allocation.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3050 for 130W, a 40W (24%) decrease compared to the RTX 3060 that seems broadly in line with the reduction in core-count. We are using our new GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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