Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti brings the entry price for Ampere GPUs right down to $400, because apparently the GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3090 weren’t selling out fast enough. Maybe that’s not fair, but round four of the Nvidia Ampere architecture seems destined to repeat recent history and sell out within minutes of launch. the very fact that this is often now the simplest price to performance ratio in GPU land makes it one among the simplest graphics cards, and it currently occupies seventh place on our GPU Benchmarks hierarchy, not counting any Titan cards. Maybe if you have been specialized (or you’re really lucky), you will be ready to procure one this side of 2021. Here’s our advice on the way to buy an RTX 3060 Ti.
Not an entire lot has changed relative to the RTX 3070. Both the RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 use an equivalent GA104 GPU, but the 3060 Ti has fewer functional units enabled. You get an equivalent 8GB of GDDR6 memory, clocked at an equivalent 14Gbps. Meanwhile, the GPU core has 38 SMs enabled, versus 46 SMs on the 3070, making the 3060 Ti theoretically around 17 percent lower. Clock speeds also think about a touch, because the boost clock in the 3060 Ti is 3.5 percent lower, so generally, the most important performance gap is going to be about 20 percent — and as we’ll see, it’s often quite a bit but that.
Graphics Card | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 2060 Super | RTX 3070 | RTX 2080 Super |
Architecture | GA104 | TU106 | GA104 | TU104 |
Process Technology | Samsung 8N | TSMC 12FFN | Samsung 8N | TSMC 12FFN |
Transistors (Billion) | 17.4 | 10.8 | 17.4 | 13.6 |
Die size (mm^2) | 392.5 | 445 | 392.5 | 545 |
TPCs | 19 | 17 | 23 | 24 |
M | 38 | 34 | 46 | 48 |
GPCs | 5 | 3 | 6 | 6 |
GPU Cores | 4864 | 2176 | 5888 | 3072 |
Tensor Cores | 152 | 272 | 184 | 384 |
RT Cores | 38 | 34 | 46 | 48 |
Base Clock (MHz) | 1410 | 1470 | 1500 | 1650 |
Boost Clock (MHz) | 1665 | 1650 | 1725 | 1815 |
VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 14 | 14 | 14 | 15.5 |
VRAM (GB) | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
VRAM Bus Width | 256 | 256 | 256 | 256 |
ROPs | 80 | 64 | 96 | 64 |
TMUs | 152 | 136 | 184 | 192 |
TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) | 16.2 | 7.2 | 20.3 | 11.2 |
Tensor TFLOPS FP16 (Sparsity) | 65 (130) | 57 | 81 (163) | 89 |
RT TFLOPS (approximate) | 39.7 | 23.8 | 39.7 | 31.6 |
Bandwidth (Gbps) | 448 | 448 | 448 | 496 |
TDP (watts) | 200 | 185 | 220 | 185 |
Dimensions | 242x112x38 mm | 229x113x38 mm | 242x112x38 mm | 267x116x38 mm |
Weight | 1031g | 975g | 1034g | 1278g |
Launch Date | 20-Oct | 19-Jul | 20-Oct | 19-Jul |
Launch Price | $399 | RTX | $499 | RTX |
Nvidia Turing GPUs
The specs tell an equivalent story relative to the previous generation Nvidia Turing GPUs. The 3060 Ti has quite a bit more theoretical compute performance than the 2080 Super and quite doubles the compute performance relative to the 2060 Super. we all know GPU prices are all types of screwed up immediately, but it’s worth remembering that the 2060 Super had an equivalent official $399 price because the 3060 Ti. Power requirements are slightly above the 2060 Super, but less than the 2080 Super.
Of course, theoretical specs don’t always jive with real-world performance. one among the large changes with Ampere is that the INT32 cores can now do FP32 calculations also. However, there is a decent amount of INT32 add most games, so an honest chunk of the potential FP32 performance is employed up elsewhere. Still, with the opposite architectural changes, we expect the 3060 Ti to perform roughly on par with the 2080 Super, which suggests it’ll even be significantly faster than the 2060 Super.
RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition
There are not any surprises concerning the planning and aesthetics of the GeForce 3060 Ti Founders Edition: It’s just like the 3070 FE, apart from the tiny text that now says 3060 Ti. it is a reasonably compact card that will slot in most cases, measuring 9.5 inches long. If you’re doing a mini-ITX build, plan accordingly, but most ATX and micro-ATX cases should be fine.
With a reduced TDP of 200W, and considering what we saw from the 3070, cooling and noise shouldn’t pose any problem. We’ll get to the hard numbers later, but let’s just say that the 1665 MHz boost clock is extremely conservative at stock, and there is an honest little bit of overclocking headroom also.
Connectivity consists of an equivalent triple DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and a single HDMI 2.1 port that we have seen on other Ampere Founders Edition models. you’ll spend to four monitors, and there is some ventilation on the remainder of the IO bracket.
Somewhat interesting is that even the 3060 Ti Founder Edition continues to use Nvidia’s 12-pin power connector. Again, we’re almost sure what the purpose is, particularly since it just takes one 8-pin PEG connector on one end and passes that through to the 12-pin connection. Even better is that Nvidia had concept renderings of the 3070 with an 8-pin connector. It doesn’t really matter, because the adapter cable is included within the box, but it is also completely unnecessary. The 3080/3090 a minimum of changed the PCB and have the 12-pin connector mounted in such how that it uses a touch less area. Not surprisingly, none of the AIB partners seem curious about pushing the 12-pin agenda, so if you actually do not like it, there’ll be many other options.
RTX 3060 Ti — Ray Tracing and DLSS Performance
Given what we have seen thus far, it is a safe bet that the 3060 Ti is going to be nearly as good because the 2080 Super when it involves ray tracing performance. We’ve tested most XDR-capable GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, omitting only the Titan RTX and therefore the non-Super 20-series GPUs.
We’ve also tested the 3060 Ti with DLSS enabled on the games that support DLSS. That’s seven of the ten XDR games, which is sensible as XDR can convince be a touch much for many of the GPUs running at native resolution. Note that the composite score for the 3060 Ti DLSS doesn’t include results from the opposite three tests in the least, so it isn’t fully comparable, but it’s a stimulating datum regardless.
We’ll accompany an equivalent format because of the extended test suite, so 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results are lumped together in each gallery. Swipe to look at the extra charts, and as mentioned earlier, all of those tests were run on the Core i9-9900KPC. Again, since Nvidia was the sole ray tracing option until last month, most of the games are Nvidia promoted titles. They’re also inherently optimized more for Nvidia‘s hardware.