Uncategorized

NVIDIA Launches the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti: A Slightly Cheaper RTX 2080

NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, stating that the new cut-down Ampere card competes with the GeForce RTX 2080 Super while coming in at a 35K INR or US$ 399 price point. 

A year ago, a card at this price, offering this level of performance and value additions like ray-tracing and DLSS would have been a very compelling buy. The problem with that proposition?

Such a card already exists: the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super launched at roughly 40,000 INR, only slightly higher than the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. We fully expect to see AIB models of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti that cost as much or more than reference GeForce RTX 2070 Supers. The 2070 Super (also) offered GeForce GTX 1080 Ti levels of performance, along with support for NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing tech and DLSS.

As a Turing card, it also featured somewhat better overclocking headroom than what we’ve seen so far from Ampere. Going by the performance gap between the GeForce RTX 2080 Super and the GeForce RTX 2070 Super, we’re looking at a 10-15 percent performance delta between the GeForce RTX 2070 Super and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. That is if NVIDIA’s claims of GeForce RTX 2080 Super-beating performance actually pan out. In practice, the “2080 Ti-beating” GeForce RTX 3070 frequently delivers worse results in rasterized workloads, for instance. 

All this paints the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti as a singularly uninteresting card. In a world where top-end Ampere and Big Navi turned price-performance expectations over on the head at the high end, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is more or less a re-run of the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. The extra VRAM (unofficial estimates place it at 12GB) could be useful and the mild bump to raster performance means a more refined overall experience relative to the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. But still, this fundamentally last year’s card, struggling to justify itself in a market price-performance champions have emerged once again. 

Arjun

Penguin-published author, and journalist. Loves PC hardware but has terrible hand-eye coordination. Most likely to be found playing Total War or watching weird Russian sitcoms.
Back to top button