RTX 3060 Ti Review and Benchmarks
Nvidia and AMD have been on a tear with hardware releases, both releasing GPUs that have changed the GPU landscape with their power and great pricing. Today, we will be looking at the RTX 3060 Ti, a mid-range GPU from Nvidia with high expectations as all other 3000 series GPUs are amazingly hard to come by, and it doesn’t hurt to have another option around. Let’s see how well the 3060 Ti handles various games in 1080p, 1440p, and 4k.
Recommendation and Test Bench
The 3060 Ti is slated to be similar to a 2080 Super, meaning most mid to high-end processors should pair well with this GPU. Like the RX 6800 benchmark we did, we will recommend the most recent releases of processors from AMD and Intel, the AMD 5000 Series or the Intel 10th Gen, as they are significantly better than their predecessors. You can still definitely pair AMD 3000 Series or 9th Gen Intel with the 3060 Ti and still get amazing results but if you have yet to pick out a processor, go with the newer CPUs.
Benchmarks
No changes were made to the 3060 Ti. We wanted to provide results akin to opening a box and putting the card into your system. All games were set to their highest graphical settings, excluding motion blur. We ran the benchmarks for the various games multiple times, and the data shown are the averages of all runs done. Benchmarking was done using the MSI Afterburner benchmarking tool to log the information.
GTA was a bizarre game to benchmark, encountering weird stutters during some of the benchmarking at 1080p and crashes randomly throughout 1080p and 1440p testing. Ended up running this on DirectX10 rather than DirectX11 as 11 was causing a lot of the issues. The 1080p 1% Low was consistently low throughout all the benchmarking. The 1440p 1% Low had high variance, going from 6-55.4 FPS. The most surprising part was the 4K benchmark, delivering consistent 80FPS for the 1% Low, and experienced no crashes or stutters. One thing to note is the CPU Bottleneck at 1080p and 1440p, and 4k would be the recommended resolution to be aiming for.
Frametimes are as follow, 1080p; 5.36ms | 1440p; 5.31ms | 4k; 7.25ms
Hitman 2 was a more standard benchmark with expected results based on previous benchmarks. High framerates at all resolutions and still acceptable frame rate at 4k 60FPS. The 1% Low for 1080p and 1440p is consistent with previous benchmarks. We attribute the similarity to the game engine.
Frametimes are as follow, 1080p; 7.56ms | 1440p; 9.37ms | 4k; 17.01ms
Average FPS was excellent, which makes the 3060Ti great at all resolutions to use. Seeing a consistent 1%, Low was weird and couldn’t reproduce this on another test bench with a different GPU. This is great to ensure that, at the minimum, you see 60FPS.
Frametimes are as follow, 1080p; 6.16ms | 1440p; 7.39ms | 4k; 10.51ms
Horizon Zero Dawn is the most standard of results for our benchmarks. Lower resolution for more frames at both average and 1% Low. Also, in the most demanding game that we benched, everything looked great at 1080p and 1440p. This game did stutter a bit at 4K and probably would be pushing the limit at 4k 60FPS gaming.
Conclusions
For MSRP $400, this graphics card is pretty good value. Excelling at 1440p and is completely playable at 4K, this GPU will help usher in the 1440p resolution. This is performing as expected, with just slightly worse performance than the 3070 for 100$ less, putting this card as one of the leaders at the Mid-Range price range. Due to the low supply and the 3000 series GPUs' high demand, this card is a great fallback card if you cannot find the higher end cards.
