Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050: Three years without leaving the place

a nvidia Brought GeForce RTX 3050, a graphics chip originally launched for laptops, for the desktop video card market. Yes, it’s actually been a week since then We’ve seen AMD do just that And you go very wrong. Will you go this time? Or will this be another bad day for desperate people video card Input, but still with decent performance?

As in the entry-level hardware market, this product uses current generation technologies of nvidia, but with several limitations. Although, the differences appear here when compared With the RX 6500 XT released by AMD last week. The cuts don’t go too far, especially in the critical specifications of the card’s business. So a total of 8 GB of GDDR5 memory was retained – unlike the laptop versions, which have only 4 GB models. There’s also no PCIe lane cutoff, with a total of x16 communication channels, meaning that even on a PCI Express 3.0 system, it has enough bandwidth to keep the graphics chip performing high.

Where are the cuts then? Compared to the RTX 3060, we have slight reductions such as CUDA cores (from 3584 to 2560) and about 30% reduction in available architectures. On the other hand, there is also a drop in prices, as the RTX 3060 was launched for $329 while the RTX 3050 was announced for $249. This is more forward.

Starting with performance, with FullHD, this chip is capable of taking on any game with Ultra configuration or at least in Alto at high frame rates.

Even with ray tracing, it is able to work, but for these scenarios it must be combined with technologies such as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution or Nvidia DLSS.

In all of these scenarios, we can see a pattern where the card is 10-20% behind the RTX 2060, and about 25-30% below the RTX 3060. Against AMD’s entry-level competitor, the Radeon RX 6600, we have two scenarios. In drip, the AMD card has a wide advantage, opening from 15 to 30%. But it does play some of the features related to Ray Tracing and Nvidia’s greater efficiency in this area makes both cards touch.

But there is one element in favor of the RTX 3050 that could make it attractive to the GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 crowd, at this point desperate for an upgrade to continue running versions in high quality: It’s the cheapest RTX offered so far. This makes it bring in technologies such as ray tracing acceleration and especially DLSS.

Upscaling techniques, especially DLSS, have achieved impressive results, but they have limitations. And one of the biggest is that if you don’t provide enough pixels of information, there’s no way an algorithm or even machine learning can reconstruct a final, high-quality image. That’s why FullHD DLSS is more rigorous than 4K DLSS – and the RTX 3050 doesn’t work with 4K or DLSS.

In our comparisons, DLSS in Quality mode still maintains a good level of graphics and definition at 1080p, but reducing it to Balanced mode will already have a negative impact on definition. This is not a surprise, because DLSS in quality mode on FullHD already uses only a 720p display as a base, and making it balanced reduces this to only 1114 x 626, that is, we are starting to get very little information about machine learning for work.

But there is a good relationship between: 1440 pixels. With the good performance of the RTX 3050 at 1080p, you can use DLSS in quality mode to scale from FullHD to QuadHD, with very positive results in both performance and final image quality. By abandoning Ultra for High, and using quality DLSS, it is possible to achieve a sufficiently high frame rate in almost all titles.

And how useful is it to have DLSS instead of AMD FSR? In direct comparison with the Quality and 1440p modes, it is clear that DLSS provides more definition in the image and better resolves jagged edges on some edges. Here you need to give FSR a helping hand, let it display more image with Ultra Quality mode, and DLSS still works better.

Given these modifications in the performance graph, we have the following scenario:

Here we have a head start on the RTX 3050 (versus the RX 6600) for those with an eye on QuadHD. In games with DLSS, you can look for a quality that is very close to the original with a good level of performance, while the Radeon model will need to either render locally, or bring these losses in the final image quality to enable FSR. The result is still good, but it is less than what DLSS offers.

So, this time it makes sense to buy a laptop chip brought to computers? Here we have a completely different situation than the RX 6500 XT. This chip preserves all the elements to deliver a good experience, such as sufficient video memory, PCIe fonts that are not a bottleneck even in a 3.0 configuration, the possibility of broadcasting or recordings accelerated by NVENC, and above all, very consistent performance and ready to face FullHD in high quality and even QuadHD with the help of DLSS. But it all depends on the price.

At a value close to the RTX 2060 and underperforming in many tests, This model is a picture of the stagnation in the entry-level graphics card market. It arrives struggling to show a clear improvement over the card released three years ago, with only some improvements in RT and more memory – and well behind the Radeon RX 6600 in many scenarios, and it’s also pretty close in cost.

Again, a panel that hardly fits against models that have been on the market for years

In theory, it is a card with a good level of performance, but in practice, for those who are looking for a new video card, it brings practically nothing new. And nothing will help the sad situation of looking for an entry-level graphics card, with an acceptable balance between cost and performance.