Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review

1. Introduction2. Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Borderlands 37. Control8. Death Stranding9. The Division 210. F1 202011. Far Cry New Dawn12. Gears 513. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint14. Metro Exodus15. Middle Earth: Shadow of War16. Red Dead Redemption 217. Shadow of the Tomb Raider18. Total War Saga: Troy19. Watch Dogs: Legion20. Performance Summary (14 Game Average)21. Cost Per Frame Analysis22. Ray Tracing - Control23. Ray Tracing - Shadow of the Tomb Raider24. Ray Tracing - Watch Dogs: Legion25. DLSS - Control & Death Stranding26. Productivity: Blender & Octane27. Productivity: SPECViewPerf & V-Ray28. Clock Speed29. Temperatures30. Acoustics31. Noise-Normalised Temperatures32. Power Consumption33. Performance Per Watt34. Overclocking35. Closing Thoughts36. View All Pages

Claimed to be faster than the RTX 2080 Super, today marks the launch of Nvidia's latest Ampere GPU, the RTX 3060 Ti. Priced at £369 here in the UK, the RTX 3060 Ti is the next step down in the 30-series stack, bringing Ampere to its lowest price point yet. Using a cut-down version of the RTX 3070 GPU, it looks tailor-made for a high refresh-rate 1080p or 1440p display, so let's see exactly what this new GPU can deliver.

There's been a succession of GPU launches over the past couple of months, but for the most part the focus has been on the high-end segment – those willing to spend upwards of £500 (or significantly more!) for a new graphics card. With the RTX 3060 Ti, Nvidia is bringing its latest Ampere GPU down into the mid-range, with the MSRP set to £369 here in the UK.

That's exactly £300 less than what the RTX 2080 Super launched for just last year, yet Nvidia isn't shy about claiming the RTX 3060 Ti is the faster GPU. We're also told to expect an uplift of 40% compared to the RTX 2060 Super, which itself launched for £379 in July 2019. Here, we put both claims to the test, looking at 1080p, 1440p and 4K performance over a range of AAA games.

GPU	RTX 3090	RTX 3080	RTX 3070	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 2080 SUPER
SMs	82	68	46	38	48
CUDA Cores	10496	8704	5888	4864	3072
Tensor Cores	328	272	184	152	384
RT Cores	82	68	46	38	48
Texture Units	328	272	184	152	192
ROPs	112	96	96	80	64
GPU Boost Clock	1695 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz	1665 MHz	1815 MHz
Memory Data Rate	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps	14 Gbps	15.5 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	936 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec	496.1 GB/sec
TGP	350W	320W	220W	200W	250W

The RTX 3060 Ti is the first Ampere GPU to launch which wasn't announced in the September livestream event. Just like the RTX 3070, however, it uses Nvidia’s GA104 GPU, but a cut-down version of that silicon. That means the RTX 3060 Ti incorporates 38 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere’s new SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving a total of 4684.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 38 RT cores and 152 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 152 texture units, and 80 ROPs which are now housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 5 GPCs in total for RTX 3070.

Clock speed is slightly lower than the RTX 3070. The RTX 3070 Founders Edition has a reference clock of 1725MHz, but the RTX 3060 Ti drops that down to 1665MHz. We test real-world clock speed behaviour later in this review.

For the memory, Nvidia is using the same configuration as the RTX 3070. That means it sports 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus, for total memory bandwidth of 448 GB/Sec. My particular Founders Edition model uses Samsung G6 memory, but we have also seen Micron memory being used in the past.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3060 Ti for 200W, which is 20W less than the RTX 3070 as a result of its lower core-count and slightly reduced clock speed.

Become a Patron!