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

To assess the RTX 3050’s ray tracing, we tested it in Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Resident Evil Village. In each case, ray tracing was set to its lowest in-game setting:

• Cyberpunk 2077: Ray Traced Lighting at Medium. Ray traced reflections and ray traced shadows turned off.
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition:  Ray Tracing set to Normal.
• Resident Evil Village: Ray traced reflections and shadows set to Low.

For games that support the technology, we have added an extra data point for the RTX 3050 when benchmarked with DLSS set to Quality mode.

We will also touch on ray tracing – after all, the RTX 3050 is Nvidia’s first sub-£300 card to feature the technology. I’m not sure how many people will want to turn it on, but it can do a decent-enough job when using lower RT quality settings, as we can see in Cyberpunk and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, but turning on DLSS goes a long way to making things more playable.

Generally, we are looking at RT performance below the RTX 2060 so I wouldn’t say it is a killer addition for the RTX 3050, but at least you can enable the technology without absolutely tanking the frame rate.

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