NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Review: Breakout Speed At $399

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards represented in this article on an ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard powered by an Intel Core i9-10980XE 18-core / 36-thread processor and 32GB of HyperX DDR4 RAM clocked at 2,933MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, games, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests. For all of the standard tests, the Radeon RX 6800 was tested using its "Balanced" performance profile.

HotHardware's Test System Intel Core i9 Powered

Hardware Used: Intel Core i9-10980XE (3GHz - 4.4GHz, 18-Core) ASUS X299 Prime (Intel X299 Chipset) 32GB Corsair DDR4-2933 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio Integrated Network MSI RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Tro NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT AMD Radeon RX 6800

Relevant Software: Windows 10 Pro x64 (v2004) AMD Radeon Software v20.8.3 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v457.30/40 Benchmarks Used: VRMark 3DMark (Time Spy, Fire Strike, Port Royal, DXR) Unigine Superposition Crytek Neon Noir Metro Exodus Red Dead Redemption 2 Gears Tactics FarCry: New Dawn

Unigine Superposition Pseudo-DirectX / OpenGL Gaming

Superposition is a relatively new benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in as well. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in two modes using the DirectX code path – 1080p Extreme and VR Future -- to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition

Unigine Superposition's 1080P Extreme test has the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards from NVIDIA and MSI sandwiching the GeForce RTX 2080 Super, and significantly outpacing the GeForce RTX 2070 Super and everything below it.


In Unigine's VR Future benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio fall in just behind the GeForce RTX 2080 Super, though the MSI card's higher clocks push it much closer to the 2080 Super.

UL VRMark Testing Rift And Vive Readiness

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio trail the GeForce RTX 2080 Super once again in VR Mark, but both cards have no trouble dispatching the RTX 2060 Super or Radeon RX 5700 XT.
 

UL 3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 Performance

In the DX12-based 3DMark Tme Spy benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio fall in between the faster GeForce RTX 3070 FE and slower GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Once again -- as we'll see throughout out performance data -- the MSI card's higher clocks push it well ahead of the 3060 Ti FE.

UL 3DMark Fire Strike Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

Our results in the DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark have the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio landing right about in the middle of the pack, just ahead of the RTX 2080 Super, but a few percentage points behind the RTX 2080 Ti.

UL 3DMark Port Royal DXR Ray Tracing Benchmark

Port Royal was released earlier this year as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable DXR, and NVIDIA is the only company to have done so at this point, hence the lack of Radeons in the chart.

3DMark's Port Royal ray tracing benchmark has the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio sandwiching the GeForce RTX 2080 Super once again, with the faster MSI card coming out on top. In this first ray tracing-enabled test, the new RTX 3060 Ti cards come within striking distance of the more expensive Radeon RX 6800 as well.

We also experimented with the recently released 3DMark DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test to see how things shook out..

In this more complex ray tracing benchmark, the Radeon RX 6800 takes a big hit and ends up trailing the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Gaming X Trio by a few percentage points. This particular benchmark illustrates NVIDIA's lead with ray tracing -- team green is on its second generation, while team red just entered the game a couple of weeks ago with their first effort.