Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review
Conclusion
There is no doubt that when it comes to looking at purchasing a new GPU it is, for all but the very luckiest ones amongst you, a balance between the performance you desire and the performance you can achieve. Yes we’d all love the insanity and futureproofing that a RTX 3090 brings to the party, but few amongst us have remotely got the financial clout to have one. Especially after this year which has been trying to say the least.
The RTX 3060 Ti has a whole different cast of comparisons depending largely upon the graphics card you currently have in your system, the graphics card that Nvidia claim it is comparable to, and of course the price point it launches at. Some of these are much easier to cover with blanket statements than others. If you’ve got any card that was released before the Turing Nvidia ones, GTX 1080 Ti or below, then the RTX 3060 Ti will blow you away with its performance. To say it would be an upgrade compared to those cards is to very much under value how much of an upgrade it would be. It’ll stun you with how quickly the performance possibility has moved on and how affordable that level of ability is now, certainly compared to how much it would have cost to upgrade from a Maxwell to a Turing card.
If you’ve got a RTX 2060 or RTX then it will still be a decent improvement if you’re just looking to get a little more out of your system without breaking the bank. Once you reach RTX 2080 territory though, in either vanilla, Super, or Ti forms, then things get a little trickier. You’ve already spent a considerable wedge on those cards, and the RTX 3060 Ti wouldn’t give you enough of an upgrade to justify the outlay.
Looking at the RTX 3060 Ti in a vacuum the performance is consistently good throughout all of our testing. Certainly at the super popular 1080 or 1440 resolutions it really gets the job done and is smooth no matter what we threw at it, either AAA games or older but still visually lovely games, with everything cranked to the stops. At 4K it’s not so amazing but then it’s not really aimed at 4K gaming, even though you could get away with some careful setting tweaking to bring the frame rate up. It is also close enough, ish, to the RTX 3070 that if your budget is extremely tight then you’ll expect to have to make some settings adjustments to give you the smoothest game play. Very few of us have ever had the system to be able to just stick everything on full and play.
The RTX 3060 Ti FE requires you to change fewer settings than ever before to get buttery smooth game play in any title around, and we think that is the biggest string to its bow. It’s a sub £400 card that acts like a card costing twice the price just a generation ago. If your budget is strict then you can’t get more gaming prowess for your money, bang for buck if you like, from anything else around. At this price it makes them a whole lot more accessible – lets hope they actually have enough stock they don’t all sell out in 10 minutes again.
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