This year, a revolution took place in the world of iron – we have not seen such a sharp drop in the price of one fps, probably since the days of the GTX 1080. But if then it was about one manufacturer, then in 2020 literally everyone was shot. NVIDIA unveiled Ampere and scrapped its 20th RTX series. AMD was not taken aback and almost caught up with NVIDIA with RDNA 2 , yielding only in terms of ray tracing. At the same time, she also sent to rest Intel processors , overtaking them in terms of gaming performance. Sony and Microsoft also poured fuel on the fire , launching PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X , which are unrealistically powerful for their price .
The funny thing is that with so many different pieces of hardware and, it would seem, the possibilities of choice, all new items were in an incredible shortage. Well, it’s still clear with consoles: each generation starts there as if the manufacturers do not hope to sell more than ten thousand consoles in each country. But with video cards and processors, we saw such a deficit only in the mining boom.
Naturally, all this led to uncontrollable price increases. And if the console manufacturers still somehow control the market, then in the iron world, no one is doing this. So the RTX 3080, which should cost 64,000 rubles, is now selling for 100,000, and the RTX 3070 is being offered for 60,000 instead of 45,500.
Today, on tests, another card, which in the near future will definitely have the same shortage and price increase – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti . Officially, they want to sell it for 40,000 rubles – about halfway between the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 – but in terms of performance it costs much higher and competes with the RTX 2080 Super for 56,000 rubles.
Test sample
On tests we got a real rarity – the Founder’s Edition . Why rare? Because these cards are officially sold only in NVIDIA stores, and only they are deducted from the officially recommended price. In this regard, FE is swept away literally in the very first minutes after arriving at the warehouse, and then they already flow to Avito and to unscrupulous stores that resell them as part of very strange computers.
While the FE is essentially the most affordable board, it is made to the highest standard. The card comes in a stylish black soft-touch box. Under the lid there is a small pedestal made of velvety foam polyethylene. Under the board is a cardboard pencil case with all the complete set: this is a high-quality adapter for a new 12-pin connector and two books of instructions on expensive glossy paper.
The card itself copies the design of the older RTX 3070 and looks stylish and expensive at the same time. The mounting bar is gray, the radiator is painted in radical black, is not covered by anything and is cut in two by a curved plate of milled aluminum. At the back is the same black metal stiffener. There is no backlighting – of all the decorations, only two are milled lettering. GeForce RTX is on the side, and RTX 3060 Ti is on the back.
In terms of cooling, the 3060 Ti follows the same 30 Series cooling scheme. Since the PCB itself is very short – only 15.5 cm – the back of the heatsink literally hangs in the air. Moreover, it is through, and the turntable drives the heated air not to the I / O panel in order to throw it out of the case, but simply blows it out into the computer. Moreover, the streams go directly to the RAM and, due to the perpendicularly directed edges, to the PCIe slot area, where motherboard manufacturers usually have connectors for SSD. The second part of the radiator works according to a more classical scheme: the fins are already located in such a way that some of the hot air still leaves the computer.
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In general, such a cooling system is effective: during the entire test period, we not only did not see temperatures above 72 ° C, but we almost did not hear the fans in operation. On the other hand, the fact that most of the hot air remains inside the case is not very good. In everyday life, of course, you can close your eyes to this, but if you do everything according to your mind, then you need to increase the general blowing of the case and cooling the processor, so that they can already throw excess heat out of the computer.
As for the particulars, the radiator rests on the processor, memory and power system with a perfectly polished base with three heat pipes sealed into it. The turntables are not very big here – 85 mm each. The board is powered by a new 12-pin connector. Taking into account the power consumption of only 200 W, one could get by with standard plugs – and I’m sure many will put pressure on this in reviews. For our taste, NVIDIA is doing everything right. If we have come up with a new and, by the way, really convenient connector, then we need to promote it on all boards. So, you look, and manufacturers of power supplies will switch to it.
Specifications
Now let’s talk about the chip itself. As expected, the RTX 3060 Ti is built around a stripped-down RTX 3070 – GA104 processor with the new Ampere architecture. At the same time, he did not lose so much – only 17% of the blocks.
The number of SM kits, which include CUDA cores, AI tensor units and RT cores for ray tracing, has been reduced from 46 to 38 pieces. Thus, CUDA cores here are 4864 versus 5888 in the RTX 3070, texture units – 152 versus 184, and RT cores – 38 instead of 46. The official frequency in the boost also decreased slightly: 1665 MHz, not 1725. However, in practice, 3060 Ti like the 3070, it quietly keeps around 1875 MHz and periodically accelerates to 1980 and even 2000 MHz.
But the memory on the card is the same: it is 8 GB GDDR6 with a frequency of 14,000 MHz. It is generally accepted that such a volume is too small for 2020. The appetite for games grows every year, and in a couple of years the board will face the same problems as the GTX 980: this is when the chip is still ready to cope with increased loads, but the memory leads to constant freezes.
How true such predictions are – we do not undertake to guess. For Full HD and QHD, an 8 GB kit is enough today with a margin. In 4K – it’s already back to back, however, looking ahead, let’s say that 4K on the RTX 3060 Ti will not appeal to everyone.
In all other respects, the RTX 3060 Ti does not differ from the rest of the series. It is produced at Samsung factories8 nm process technology, which made it possible to almost double the number of CUDA cores by increasing the stock of FP32 blocks. The tensor cores that bear the DLSS load have also changed. First, there are half of them, but they work twice as fast. Secondly, they can now work in parallel with RT-blocks. The latter, by the way, also learned new tricks. If earlier they first disassembled the structure of polygons, and then were engaged in calculating a specific light beam, now they do it in parallel. According to NVIDIA, due to this, ray tracing performance has doubled. Also, by the way, RT-blocks have learned to calculate Motion Blur, but this does not apply to games – only working 3D modeling programs.
Naturally supports RTX 3060 Ti and all new NVIDIA technologies. The most important and interesting for us – it RTX I of / About . In fact, this is an analogue of what should now be used in consoles: game data from an SSD is loaded directly into the memory of the video card, bypassing the processor. However, for now this technology is of the future, since for its implementation it is necessary to wait for instructions from Microsoft Direct Storage in DirectX.
The next item is the presence of an AV-1 video encoder . He is predicted to have a great future in working with live broadcasts. At the same time, the emphasis is usually placed on the fact that this codec copes well with 8K-resolutions, but, as it seems to us, NVIDIA added it because it is completely free, as well as with an eye to cloud broadcasting of games in 4K.
Another nice thing about the entire RTX 3000 series is the support for the Reflex program . For our taste, its usefulness is rather doubtful for an ordinary player, but it will definitely interest those who try their hand at eSports. Actually, with the help of Reflex, NVIDIA wants to reduce the input lag – the time from pressing a key to the result on the display. Technically, this is implemented by reducing the frame queue on the processor, however, in order for the system to work, Reflex also needs support from the game. Fortnite , Apex Legends , Valorant , Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone are familiar with the technology today .
Performance
Under load, we managed to raise the chip temperature to 72 ° C – this is in Metro : Exodus and at a constant frequency of 1875 MHz. There is practically no noise from the fans. At least, the RTX 3060 Ti FE does not stand out from the general background of the processor turntables and power supply unit.
But the performance of the card is amazing. And so much so that we even rechecked the settings of the test bench several times – is there any overclocking or any errors in the settings. The point is that the 3060 Ti is indeed faster than the RTX 2080 Super. Not much – as a rule, we are talking about 2-4 fps – but against the background of the price gap, this seems incredible. Let’s remind that now 2080 Super costs 55,000 rubles. RTX 3060 Ti – officially 40,000 rubles. And for this money, we get a quiet compact board that pulls absolutely all games at maximum speed.
Moreover, in Full HD below 80 fps, only Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Metro: Exodus fell , which showed 77 and 79 frames per second. All the others easily overcame this mark. Horizon Zero Dawn took 116 frames, Watch Dogs: Legion – 81, Total War: Three Kingdoms – 93, Borderlands 3 – 98. Ray-traced games also feel fine in Full HD. Watch Dogs: Legion runs at 50 frames with subsidence up to 35, Metro: Exodus – 61 at 38 fps by 0.1%.
The fps remains absolutely stable even after switching to QHD. Yes, this is no longer 80 frames per second, but the card produces 60, and in all projects, from Metro: Exodus to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. But ray tracing will be turned on only by those who are ready to sacrifice the ideal frame rate in favor of a beautiful picture. In the same Watch Dogs Legion and Metro: Exodus, the number of frames drops to 32 and 45. And if Metro still remains within the comfortable limits of 0.1%, then Legion begins to sin with frequent microfreezes. However, DLSS can help here , which increases the frame rate by about 50%.
The situation is similar with 4K. Those who are ready to play at minimum 35-40 fps for the sake of high image quality will be satisfied. Below 3060 Ti practically does not fall, and where it falls, either a slight rollback in graphics settings or DLSS, which practically does not differ from real 4K, often helps. But for those who cannot live without 60 fps, for 4K you need to look at something more powerful – well, or select the settings for each game in a pinpoint, so as not to lose much in quality and get a higher frame rate.
The bottom line is that until an adequate response from AMD comes out, the RTX 3060 Ti is the best deal for the money. We are sure that it will drag Full HD at maximum speed for more than one year. QHD should also hold out for a while. But taking this card with a 4K sight is probably not worth it. Let the chip now more or less cope with this resolution, but it will not last long, and it is quite possible that the current 35 fps in a year will turn into an unplayable 25.
