Nvidia RTX 3060 Benchmark: Initial Results Show It's Not Hitting Expectations

Sieeka Khan, Tech Times 19 January 2021, 11:01 am

Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3060 is about to get launched and fans of the graphics card are excited. After all, the RTX 3060 does bring Nvidia's signature Ampere architecture down to $329, which is a price that most people can afford should there be stock available.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Benchmark Graph

The RTX 3060 will certainly sell in greater volumes and it could be used by more gamers for actual gaming than other graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX 3080 and Nvidia RTX 3090. In 2022, it will be the $329 RTX 3060 that will be moving up the Steam hardware survey table and not the $1,500 Nvidia RTX 3090.

Unfortunately, the RTX 3060 looks like it is not hitting the expectations. The first indication is in the form of the benchmark graph from Nvidia that is included in the RTX 3060 section of its CES 2021 stream on January 18, which compares the new RTX 3060 with the previous-gen RTX 2060.

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Only two of the four game benchmarks are running in conventional raster mode compared with the ray-tracing and Nvidia's DLSS tech running. The performance jump for the rasterized games on the left of the chart, and some of the RT+DLSS titles look pretty good.

If you dig a bit deeper, you will see that the reason why the RTX 3060 may be less of a leap than the others is because the RTX 3060 bears little real relation to RTX 3060 Ti. The new RTX 3060 vanilla is based on the smaller and cheaper GA106 GPU, and not to the GA104 that is found in the RTX 3060 Ti and in the Nvidia RTX 3070.

One impact is a reduction in memory bus width from 256-bit to 192-bit. However, the 2060 was a 192-bit board too. Instead, the finer details of the GPU spec is what worries the gamers.

Nvidia has only released the partial specs and not the full details yet. What is known is that the RTX 3060 has 3,584 CUDA cores that are running at 1.78GHz. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 Ti has 4,864 cores that are running at 1.67GHz and a 256-bit memory bus.

RTX generation comparison

The old RTX 2060 has 1,920 cores and up to 1.68GHz, while the RTX 2060 Super has 2,176 cores that runs up to 1,650MHz.

That may imply a massive jump with the new RTX 3060. But then Ampere brings massive increases in core counts, but it has smaller jumps in other areas like the texture units and the ROPS, things that really matters for conventional raster rendering, which is that games use.

For now, Nvidia has not released the final specs for the texture units and the render outputs for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. But, if you do use the partitioning and the ratios of other Ampere GPUS re, CUDA cores, ROPs and textures are your guide, all based on the 3,584 CUDA cores of the Nvidia RTX 3060, it will actually have fewer texture units but it will slightly have more ROPs compared with a RTX 2060.