If you’ve specifically been waiting for a $300-ish card to replace an aging GPU 2021
You probably know that CPU power matters less as you raise the resolution; at 4K or 1440p, your frame rate is limited a lot more by your graphics card in all but a handful of games.
But at 1440p, the vanilla 3060 doesn’t have quite enough oomph to regularly make it over 60fps in the latest games without tweaking lots of settings in a build like mine — and yet the 3060 Ti generally hits 60 without a problem.
I benched 14 games with the 3060 and 3060 Ti at ultra spec, with and without ray tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS, and the 3060 Ti was almost always between 15 percent and 35 percent faster. The 3060 is punching below its weight: a higher boost clock and 12GB of memory can’t hope to make up for 26 percent fewer cores and a narrower 192-bit memory bus.
You’ll see in the chart that neither card let me comfortably run the most demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus at ultra spec at 1440p, but the difference between these two cards is the difference between running those games at medium or high levels of detail. High settings tend to look a lot better, and it’s nice to have some additional headroom for future games that’ll push the GPU even harder.
That said, these frame rates are still nothing to sneeze at. My four-year-old GTX 1080 couldn’t dream of maxing out Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1440p at a smooth 78fps or Warzone at 87fps. I had to play through a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 at low spec earlier this year, which I absolutely do not recommend, and I’d honestly been saving Control until I could find a new GPU. It’s also very nice to be able to play Star Wars Squadrons at a full 120fps (even if I could get to 144fps with a 3060 Ti) or the delightful but unoptimized Valheim at around 60fps with the eye candy turned on.
https://facinghistory.instructure.com/eportfolios/7763/Home/Sledujte_Jan_ika_2021_Medieval_Cel_Film_Online_Zadarmao_CSSK_Dabing
https://facinghistory.instructure.com/eportfolios/7764/Home/FILMY__Jan_ika_2021_Medieval_Cel_Film_CZSK_Dabbing_Zadarmao
https://ncdpi.instructure.com/eportfolios/501/Home/______Dara_of_Jasenovac_______2021
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https://aste.instructure.com/eportfolios/344/Home/____Dara_of_Jasenovac_2021_____SRRU
https://ja.instructure.com/eportfolios/118/Home/___Supernova_______2021
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https://www.guest-articles.com/education/according-to-los-angeles-police-the-victim-was-walking-the-dogs-when-an-unknown-male-shot-him-about-25-02-2021
https://www.guest-articles.com/education/specialists-are-looking-for-the-shooter-who-they-said-utilized-a-self-loading-weapon-and-sped-from-25-02-2021
https://www.thewyco.com/news/into-that-chaos-nvidia-is-launching-the-329-geforce-rtx-3060-a-card-the-company-insists-will-actually-have-a-starting-price-of-329-25-02-2021
https://goxexa2828.medium.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-survey-329-with-a-reference-mark-sign-318e7879a922
And if you’ve got a 1080p monitor instead of 1440p, or if you’re a fan of Nvidia’s resolution-reducing, AI-sharpening DLSS technique — I hate it, my colleague Tom Warren loves it — you can genuinely turn on ray tracing with a $329 graphics card and begin to experience the wonder of real-time reflections. A 46fps average in Control may not sound like a lot, but it’s a smooth game north of 45fps if you’ve got a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor actually delivering each of those frames, and that’s what I saw with ray tracing turned on at 1080p. With ray tracing off, Watch Dogs Legion and Metro Exodus look playable at 1080p high spec as well.
But even then, 1080p is a resolution where your CPU begins to matter, and my Core i7-7700K or earlier won’t always be enough. The new Microsoft Flight Simulator is famously CPU-limited, and to some degree so is Cyberpunk, where I saw dips below 60fps no matter what level of detail I’d set.
If you’ve specifically been waiting for a $300-ish card to replace an aging GPU, you’ll be satisfied with lower settings over the next couple of years, and you can actually find an RTX 3060 at its retail price, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. But I’d set aside $500 for an RTX 3070, and though I settled for a $400 RTX 3060 Ti, I can’t imagine settling for a 3060 instead.
If you have an extra $70 in the budget for the slightly beefier card, I would absolutely spend it. And if you can’t find what you want, I’d say keep on waiting. The GPU market is wild right now, but more chips are coming, including what should be a more affordable AMD GPU on March 3rd.