Nvidia RTX 3060 Review ft. Gigabyte Gaming OC

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RTX 3060 Gaming OC3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Control8. Cyberpunk 20779. Dirt 510. The Division 211. F1 202012. Gears 513. Hitman 314. Metro Exodus15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Total War Saga: Troy17. Watch Dogs: Legion18. Performance Summary (12 Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing - Control21. Ray Tracing - Metro Exodus22. Ray Tracing - Watch Dogs: Legion23. DLSS On - Control & Watch Dogs: Legion24. Resizable BAR - Tested25. Blender26. Clock Speed27. Temperatures28. Acoustics29. Noise-Normalised Temperatures30. Power Consumption31. Performance Per Watt32. Overclocking33. Closing Thoughts34. View All Pages

The RTX 3060 is the first GPU from Nvidia to support resizable BAR, the PCIe feature which gives your CPU full access to a GPU's VRAM buffer, where previously access was limited to much smaller chunks. AMD introduced support for this technology as part of its Smart Access Memory (SAM) feature with the RX 6000 series.

Unlike AMD, Nvidia's implementation of resizable BAR is not limited to certain motherboards – whether you have an Intel or AMD platform, as long as your motherboard has an option for resizable BAR, it should work.

In my case, with the ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero, Re-Size BAR Support is found in the BIOS within the PCI Subsystem Settings. Whether it is on or off can be verified on the System Information tab within the Nvidia Control panel.

Nvidia has also implemented the technology differently to AMD, in that it will only work on a select list of games that Nvidia has verified will work. With RX 6000, SAM could cause negative performance scaling, but Nvidia has designed this work-around to avoid any performance degradation as a result of resizable BAR.

Currently, that list of supported games only includes 8 titles but Nvidia says it is committed to testing more. Here is the full list:

• Battlefield V
• Assassins Creed Valhalla
• Gears 5
• Borderlands 3
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Metro Exodus
• Watch Dogs Legion
• Forza Horizon 4

This means if a game isn't on the ‘allow' list, resizable BAR may as well be disabled as it won't do anything. Funnily enough, I had already done all my testing before finding out about this list, and the results clearly verify this information – any game I tested that wasn't on the list showed absolutely no change in overall performance.

Here's all 12 games from my test suite, benchmarked with and without resizable BAR, at 1080p:

Ignoring the games not on the allow list, resizable BAR can make a small difference to performance. Assassin's Creed Valhalla saw a 3% improvement, Gears 4 saw a 4% improvement, it was 2% for Metro Exodus and then 5% for Watch Dogs: Legion. It's clearly not something to go mad about, and the list of games is currently pretty small.

However, it is positive that we didn't notice any performance regressions as part of this testing. If you do get an RTX 3060, I'd definitely still verify it won't hurt performance in the games you play (which it shouldn't), but otherwise there's really nothing to complain about. It doesn't do much, but an extra 2-5% performance is hardly a bad thing.

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