Palit NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 review

Palit NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 review.

Every time a new generation of video cards comes out, the attention of journalists and the public is always riveted on older models. From them you can understand where the industry is heading, they give the most beautiful graphics and the best results. But analysis of Steam statistics shows that the five most popular video cards in the world are NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 1050 Ti, 1650, 1050 and RTX 2060. These are the video cards that game developers should focus on – after all, tens and tens of millions of people play on them. Meet the upcoming new idol: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

Small card with very good memory

For review, we were sent the RTX 3060 in the version from Palit – Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual. It comes with two coolers, takes up two slots and is powered by a classic 8-pin PCIe cable. In keeping with the best traditions of the 30th GeForce series, it has a very small printed circuit board – almost half of the case is occupied by radiators with a pass-through cooler, which turned out to be a very interesting and effective solution for cooling. The only drawback: like most RTX 30 series cards, power is connected not from the edge of the card, but exactly in the middle. It doesn’t look very good in cases with side glass, but what can you do.

The main feature of the RTX 3060 is that it has the largest amount of video memory in the RTX 30 series lineup except for the top-end RTX 3090.12 GB GDDR6 may not be very necessary for games right now, especially at 1080p, but with the proliferation of a new generation of consoles, memory requirements will only grow. Like all RTX cards, the 3060 supports DLSS image reconstruction technology, which can render games that support it at resolutions up to 9x the final resolution, which could keep the card up to date for years.

One of the most important questions of recent times “Can I buy a new video card at all?” Miners are snapping up the already released RTX 30 series as soon as they hit the shelves, and some retailers have been trying to rake out pre-orders for months, receiving only small batches of cards. NVIDIA offers its own solution – software and hardware slowdown of the mining of the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency. According to NVIDIA, the “handshake” between the driver and the video card cannot be hacked, while on the Internet it is said that hacking has already taken place – plus no one bothers to mine other cryptocurrencies on the card. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because if stores receive an insufficient number of cards, they will no longer be taken by miners, but by ordinary buyers. I would like to hope that soon the video cards will return to free sale,

Gaming performance

We decided not to waste time on trifles and test the GeForce RTX 3060 in full – at maximum settings in 4K and 1080p. Graphics cards are usually bought years in advance, so even if you’re playing at 1080p at medium to high settings, these benchmarks will help predict how the 3060 will perform in future games written for next-gen consoles.

Test computer configuration:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12/24 cores
• RAM: 32 GB (2x 16 GB HyperX Fury Black 3200Mhz CL16)
• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
• Power supply: 1600 W
• GeForce Game Ready driver 461.40
• Driver for RTX 3060 – GeForce Game Ready driver 461.64
• Resizable BAR and Above 4G decoding not included

Of course, first of all, we always run the test in the synthetic benchmark 3DMark, which usually gives us an idea of ​​what to expect from the new hardware. As it turned out, not in this case.

Game settings

In all games, vertical sync is disabled and the maximum value of the performance limitation is set, if any.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: High, FPS Benchmark Map

Rainbow Six Siege: Very High, 50% resolution

Batman Arkham Knight: High, all PhysX effects in their respective tests

Star Wars Battlefront II: Ultra HFTS Shadows

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Ultra, RTX High + DLSS shadows, in related tests

Quake II RTX: texture LOD bias 0.0, anti-aliasing none, global illumination High, depth of reflections 8; security cameras, bush, light beams, bloom, noise reduction, textures, thick glass distortions enabled, perspective projection, API Vulkan standard, multi GPU off

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: Epic

Control: Ultra, RTX High in respective tests

Gears 5: Ultra settings + Ultra texture pack

Wolfenstein: Youngblood: Uber

Doom Eternal: Ultra Nightmare

Death Stranding: Very High

Horizon: Zero Dawn: Ultimate

Star Wars Squadrons: Ultra

Watch Dogs Legion: Ultra, RTX Ultra

1080p gaming

Obviously, the RTX 3060 was built for 1080p gaming. Almost everywhere, it shows results comparable to the top-end cards of the two previous generations – GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 Super, significantly outperforming the first and slightly inferior to the second.

Please note that modern hardware is designed to run at much higher resolutions than 1080p, so games can be limited by performance, such as a processor, which will limit the graphics card.

Both MSI cards – GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 – completely refused to run Batman Arkham Knight with PhysX effects enabled. Even rolling back the driver did not help. Interestingly, this only happened at 1080p, in 4K the GTX 1080 started without problems.

Jedi: Fallen Order runs into 144 FPS limiter, it doesn’t support anymore without mods.

Although both Jedi: Fallen Order and Gears 5 are made with Unreal Engine 4, Microsoft’s game clearly favors 30th generation graphics cards. It is possible that she makes better use of FP blocks, which are much more in the new maps than in the previous ones.

We tested the GTX 1060 in this case on Nightmare settings because Doom Eternal refused to run Ultra Nightmare on this card.

Games on the idTech engine are very demanding on video memory at maximum settings. In both cases, the 12GB RTX 3060 gives it a solid edge over the 8GB RTX 2080 Super.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is very demanding on bus bandwidth, so here we see the result of the difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. The RTX 3060 with the new interface runs on par with the RTX 2080 Super, which in theory should be a faster card.

1080p RTX gaming

In Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the RTX 3060 showed one of the most interesting results, beating older video cards. The id Tech 6 engine is sensitive to the amount of video memory, so the 3060 with 12GB of memory was able to beat the much more powerful 3070 with 8GB of GDDR6.

4K gaming

In 2021, 4K gaming is not a luxury, but a reality. For the past couple of years, it has been almost impossible to buy a non-4K TV, so the question is “can I play on a computer from a big screen?” not idle at all.

In these tests, the GTX 1060 was disqualified because it still doesn’t have enough power, and its memory is not enough even for 1080p games.

Another example of the relationship between idTech 7 and video memory – the RTX 2080 Super and even the RTX 3070 go out of the way, leaving the RTX 3060 ahead.

RTX 4K gaming

The combination of high resolution and RTX can bring even the most powerful graphics cards to their knees. In these cases, you should enable DLSS and render games at a lower resolution.

Conclusions on performance

Video memory is never superfluous, especially at the turn of the transition to a new generation of consoles, along with which there is always a jump in hardware requirements. There are already games that the RTX 3060 can handle better than the RTX 2080 Super, a significantly more powerful graphics card on paper. So far, these are isolated cases, but these are still examples when a $ 330 video card competes with a card that cost 2 times more at launch. Based on the recent news about DLSS integration in Unreal Engine 4, DLSS can be expected to become much more widespread in the next couple of years, allowing the RTX 3060 to maintain its value while increasing performance through machine learning and cunning algorithms.

Performance for work

V-ray

The professional V-ray rendering engine works in almost all popular 3D scene modeling programs, including Nuke composition software, Houdini visual programming environment and Unreal Engine. It supports rendering with CUDA and RTX. The RTX 3060 handles V-ray better than previous generations of graphics cards, but is inferior to the older 30-series models. A new feature of the Ampere architecture allows RTX 30-series graphics cards to use integer (int) blocks as floating point (FP) blocks, which NVIDIA calls CUDA cores. Unlike games, V-ray requires only FP from the video card, which allows you to use the card almost entirely.

OctaneBench 2020.1.5

One of the most popular rendering engines for creating 3D scenes, Octane uses exclusively CUDA, so the path is closed for owners of AMD and Intel graphics cards. The latest versions support additional RTX acceleration, so newer graphics cards are much faster than older ones. This is especially noticeable in the RTX 30-series, with its double the number of CUDA cores, which allows the RTX 3060 to outperform one of the most powerful cards of the previous generation, the RTX 2080 Super.

Blender 2.91.2

Blender is one of the most popular 3D rendering and special effects software. It supports CPU rendering, OpenCL, CUDA, and even OptiX, an NVIDIA hardware / software interface that allows the program to use RT cores for high-quality renders. Interestingly, we found that in Blender 2.91.2 OptiX accelerates renders even on older graphics cards, but the newer RTX cards do a lot better.

Adobe Photoshop CC 2020

The most popular image processing software Adobe Photoshop supports hardware acceleration, but uses very little graphics cards, relying mainly on single-core performance. Therefore, the difference between the latest generations of video cards is minimal, any one is suitable for work in PS. Of course, large documents (larger than 10Kx10x) are best opened on computers with a lot of RAM and video memory, so here the RTX 3060 has a slight advantage over the rest of the 30-series line not only in price.

DaVinci Resolve 16

One of the most popular video editing, color grading and grading software from the Australian company Blackmagic actively uses hardware acceleration using video cards. More video memory helps even here – the RTX 3060 confidently bypasses the RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Super in standard operating modes and only lags slightly behind when it comes to heavy filters and effects on 8K video, which the extended test measures. In terms of price / quality ratio for working with video, it is difficult to come up with a video card more attractive than the RTX 3060.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 looks very tempting. If you use a computer primarily for work, and play only in your free time, then you will not find a more profitable video card – 12 GB of video memory, support for OptiX, NVENC and CUDA of the latest versions. For Adobe Photoshop CC, for example, it makes almost no difference at all whether you work on 3090 or 3060. With games, everything is surprisingly good too. We expected performance around the RTX 2070 Super, but the 3060 beats above its weight class and sometimes even surpasses the 2080 Super. This is most likely due to the high video memory requirements in some of our tests. In the coming years, game developers will continue to increase their video memory requirements, DLSS will be able to mitigate the load on the graphics card in the heaviest games, and the upcoming DirectStorage technology will allow graphics cards to directly read data from SSDs.

The question of price is still open, but here we will do without forecasts. There are too many unknowns – from how the price of cryptocurrencies will behave further, to how successful the measures taken by NVIDIA against miners will be. In any case, the crisis will end sooner or later, and as soon as it happens, the RTX 3060 will be one of the most interesting video cards in the lineup.