GeForce RTX 3050 is here: Nvidia’s mid-range graphics card with ray tracing

Nvidia and its partner manufacturers are releasing the GeForce RTX 3050 as a gaming graphics card for Full HD enjoyment on the afternoon of January 27th. With 2560 shader cores and a recommended retail price of 280 euros, it is the cheapest offshoot of the Ampere family to date. According to its RTX abbreviation, the GeForce RTX 3050 also accelerates ray tracing graphic effects in hardware and contains tensor cores, for example for the AI ​​upscaler Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

The GeForce RTX 3050 corresponds almost exactly to a GeForce RTX 3060 that has been castrated by a third, also with a GA106 GPU: 2560 instead of 3584 shader cores and 8 instead of 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with a transfer rate of 224 instead of 360 GB/s. The FP32 computing power consequently drops to 9 TFlops, while the GeForce RTX 3050 is more frugal with 130 watts. In the future, however, RTX 3050 versions with the smaller GA107 GPU that Nvidia has been selling for notebooks so far could also appear.

Unlike AMD with the Radeon RX 6500 XT, Nvidia does not save any basic functions with the GeForce RTX 3050. The Nvidia graphics card accelerates all common video codecs, including AV1, which Google is promoting on YouTube, for example. The PCI Express 4.0 interface for communication with the processor and for accessing the working memory is still eight lanes wide (PCIe 4.0 x8).

GTX 1660 Super with extra memory, ray tracing and DLSS

Numerous test reports see the GeForce RTX 3050 performing at the same level as the GeForce GTX 1660 Super from 2019. The former has almost twice the FP32 computing power, but half of the FP32 shader cores also perform integer calculations – for them the GTX 1660 Super still had independent computing cores.

As a bonus, you get an additional 2 GB of RAM as well as the ray tracing and tensor hardware, so that you can sniff the world of ray tracing graphic effects here and there in Full HD resolution. Especially in the middle class, DLSS seems to make sense to increase the frame rate. However, the GeForce RTX 2060 and Radeon RX 6600 do not reach the GeForce RTX 3060 in terms of performance.

280 euros – that corresponds to a surcharge of a good 10 percent compared to the GTX 1660 Super. In view of the current market situation, that would be fair if RTX 3050 cards really come at the price. However, since manufacturers, intermediaries and shops are already buying all other current graphics cards, the chance of a cheap GeForce RTX 3050 seems low. Nvidia itself does not sell its own Founders Edition at RRP just lists a few unavailable manufacturer cards.

(mma)