Even at 1440p, the RTX 3050 managed well over 60 fps and this made it 9% faster than the RTX 2060, and 35% faster than the 6500 XT, a great result given the current market. The RTX 3050 blasted past that result with 87 fps on average, edging it slightly ahead of the GTX 1660 Super this time. That made it 34% faster than the 6500 XT or 85% faster when limiting the 6500 XT to PCIe 3.0. A super easy win here for Nvidia.

The 6500 XT turns in one of its better figures in Far Cry 6 and as a result the 3050 was just 14% faster, though the issue for the 6500 XT is PCIe 3.0 and when compared to that configuration the 3050 was 37% faster. So, while the benchmarks highlight where the RTX 3050 is more or less akin to the GTX 1660 Ti in terms of its straight gaming performance, there is the promise of DLSS working those Tensor Cores to actually make the card a pretty capable 1440p gaming GPU where the technology is enabled. Those 2,560 CUDA cores in the RTX 3050 are split between 20 SMs which also then delivers 20 RT cores and 80 Tensor cores. It's those last two specs that separate the RTX 3050 from its GTX 1660 Ti brethren and ought to make it a far more tempting choice for the mainstream gamer. The RT cores are what allow for ray tracing and the Tensor Cores then allow you to enable DLSS to make ray tracing actually playable at a decent frame rate, all thanks to the magic of AI-powered super sampling. It is also notable that AMD's latest GPU, the Navi 24 silicon inside the RX 6500 XT is a 107mm2 chip, while the GA106 is something in the region of 276mm2. That's something which will likely come into play when it comes to manufacturing and the numbers of GPUs that each company can produce to fulfil the demand for their cards. That said, it would also be much worse value than the GTX 1650 Super and slightly worse than the RX 5600 XT, but that's to be expected given the current market, so we can accept a little bit of stagnation, even if we don't like it.

The RTX 3050 had no issue crushing that result with 225 fps on average, making it just 11% slower than the RTX 2060 and 14% faster than the GTX 1660 Super. Unbelievably, it was 92% faster than the 6500 XT, and let's not even bother with the PCIe 3.0 result for that GPU. The Watch Dogs: Legion results are quite good for the 6500 XT when using the medium quality preset. Here the RTX 3050 was good for 88 fps and that only made it 17% faster than the 6500 XT, or 28% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration, which remains a big win.

The RTX 3050 does not skimp out on video memory. Even though it is classed as an entry-level graphics card, the RTX 3050 is loaded up with 8GB of super-fast GDDR6 VRAM. This lets you enable high-res textures in games, arguably the most important graphics option, without experiencing judders as new textures are loaded into memory. In a compatible motherboard, the RTX 3050 runs over a PCIe Gen4 interface with eight lanes for high bandwidth. Read more Last up we have Cyberpunk 2077, and here the RTX 3050 managed to break the 60 fps barrier with the medium quality preset, averaging 66 fps which all things considered is quite a good result. Unfortunately, it was 18% slower than the RTX 2060, but it was also 40% faster than the 6500 XT, or 69% faster when using PCIe 3.0. I am a huge fan of DLSS, however, and it does mean that the RTX 3050 isn't just a good 1080p gaming GPU, it's actually capable of running happily on a 1440p display too. Though DLSS isn't in every game and Nvidia's new game-agnostic Nvidia Image Scaling (roughly analogous to FSR) is available to its older GPUs, too. Though that is a little unfair because the Ampere architecture at the heart of the RTX 3050 is fundamentally better than that of the Turing GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660 Ti. Again, the same can be said of the RDNA 2 tech beating beneath the RX 6500 XT's oversized coolers, when compared to the Graphics Core Next (GCN) of the RX 480.Moving to 1440p increases the margin in favor of the 3050, which is now 66% faster than the 6500 XT when using PCI 4.0 and 128% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. We're also looking at slightly better performance than the GTX 1660 Super. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. Next we have Horizon Zero Dawn where the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0 did well relative to most other games with 72 fps on average. The RTX 3050 was 14% faster, though with both using PCIe 3.0 the GeForce GPU would be a massive 55% faster.

If that's the case, then you're best off being upsold to the RX 6600, or perhaps the smarter option would be to look for a cheaper second hand option to tie you over. The RTX 3050 was 52% faster than the 6500 XT at 1080p using the second highest quality preset with 141 fps on average. PCIe 3.0 completely crippled the 6500 XT and now the RTX 3050 is seen to be 114% faster, and I should note I got the exact same result using PCIe 3.0 with the RTX 3050. It's worth keeping in mind that at this price point, the RX 6600 is technically better value as it costs just 24% more, but offers 26% more performance. Granted, they are about the same in terms of value, but when spending this much, the RX 6600 does become a viable alternative. What Does It Need to Cost? And here's a look at the 12 game average data, which has been calculated using the geomean. The RTX 3050 averaged 108fps at 1080p, which made it just 5% slower than the GTX 1660 Super, 10% slower than the RTX 2060, and 23% slower than the Radeon RX 6600.

Theoretical Performance

As we often saw, the 1440p data is even more brutal for the 6500 XT. Here the RTX 3050 was 54% faster, or 85% faster when comparing PCIe 3.0 performance. The RTX 3050 also averaged 74 fps, meaning it was more often than not good for over 60 fps at 1440p using respectable quality settings in many titles. Ray Tracing Performance If you are after one of the best budget graphics cards, you are looking in the right place. Even as the cheapest graphics card in the RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3050 offers up NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for AI-enhanced image reconstruction in games, real-time raytracing and more. is an ugly affair for the 6500 XT and it's disappointing to see that while the 4GB RX 570 can hit 60 fps and a very playable experience, the 6500 XT using PCIe 3.0 was reduced to 36 fps. The game was playable with ray tracing enabled and DLSS, delivering ~60 fps on average. Without DLSS, the frame rate dropped into the low 40s, and that's about the same level of ray tracing performance than you can expect from the RX 6600 in this title.

Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. In Doom Eternal, the RTX 3050 does extremely well matching the RTX 2060 with 178 fps on average. That meant it was 82% faster than the 6500 XT and 287% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. That's all we need to say about that. Now the RTX 3050 is 24% faster than the 6500 XT at 1440p. It was also a few frames faster than the 1660 Super and trailed the RTX 2060 by 15%. Starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, using the medium quality preset at 1080p, we find that the RTX 3050 is good for 79 fps on average, so here it's basically a GTX 1660 Super. That made it 18% faster than the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0, and 30% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration. It was also only 8% slower than the RTX 2060, a decent result overall. The RTX 3050 does race away with it at 1440p, averaging over 60 fps to make it 28% faster than the 6500 XT or 36% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. It was also 10% faster than the GTX 1660 Super, but 14-15% slower than the RTX 2060 and 5600 XT.Testing with Far Cry 6, which doesn't support DLSS, sees the RTX 3050 able to comfortably break the 60 fps barrier with ray tracing fully enabled. It was slower than the much more expensive RX 6600, but whereas it was 28% slower without RT enabled, it was just 14% slower with it enabled. The RTX 3050 had no such issues though, pumping out a super impressive 130 fps while keeping 1% lows above 100 fps. It was also 13% faster than the RTX 2060 and just 11% slower than the RX 6600. A stellar result there. Moving on to Far Cry 6, we find an average of 96 fps using the GeForce RTX 3050 at 1080p with the medium quality preset. As we've seen multiple times already, it's basically delivering 1660 Super performance, though it wasn't a great deal slower than the 2060 in this one, at least when looking at the average frame rate. Resident Evil Village isn't a very demanding game, especially with the balanced quality preset, so it's no surprise that at 1080p the RTX 3050 is comfortably pushing over 100 fps, averaging 114 fps. This is GTX 1660 Super-like performance and it meant the new budget GeForce was 52% faster than the 6500 XT, or 78% faster if we compare with the PCIe 3.0 configuration. Time for the all important cost per frame analysis. We're going to start with the MSRP using the 1080p data, but we'll include 1440p results and other data points (and assumptions) for a more realistic pricing comparison in just a moment.