When Nvidia announced the GDDR6X variant of the RTX 3060 Ti, it also announced the RTX 3060 8GB model. Unlike the former, this one looks to be a considerable downgrade over the original model. The first reviews are coming in, and overall, the lower-memory card is about 15% slower than the 12GB model.

The first review from a reputable source comes from HardwareUnboxed, who tested both cards on various games at 1080p and 1440p. These resolutions were chosen to avoid VRAM bottlenecks during testing.

At both resolutions, the 8GB RTX 3060 was the slower of the two. That was only expected, considering the 8GB model has a smaller 128-bit memory bus, compared to the 192-bit memory bus of the original RTX 3060. All other specifications remain the same, memory and clock speeds, CUDA core count and TDP.

Based on this testing, the RTX 3060 12GB averaged 110FPS (91FPS at 1%) at 1080p and 79FPS (65FPS at 1%) at 1440p. On the other hand, the 8GB model averaged 94FPS (78FPS at 1%) at 1080p and 67FPS (54FPS at 1%) at 1440p. These results put the 8GB model 15% slower than the 12GB variant.

KitGuru says: With the performance difference, perhaps this should have been an RTX 3050 Ti instead.

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