Nvidia RTX 3050 Review

Introduction

It's fair to say that the past couple of years have seen some significant shifts in the global GPU market. No sooner had we got used to the idea that the newer cards were more affordable than their forebears than the world changed utterly. Suddenly we could not only struggle to find cards, but whenever we could they were way beyond any reasonable price tag.

Nvidia's latest graphics card, the RTX 3050, seeks to address both of these issues by coming in at a reasonable sub-£300 price point, and also arriving on these shores in actual multiple hundreds of ones to buy. Clearly therefore we have two issues at stake. Firstly, is the card worthy of your investment if you are running an extremely old-school card, and how does it compare to other affordable Nvidia options?

What you are getting with the RTX 3050 is the addition of RT cores and the Tensor cores for all the high image quality, DLSS goodness. If the cards like the RTX 3060 are anything to go by then you'll definitely need that DLSS functionality to keep the frame rate north of the magical 60 FPS mark. If you prefer your games to be easier on the graphical fidelity, competitive multiplayer games for example, then you'll be pleased to note that the RTX 3050 includes the Nvidia low latency technology that helps you smite your enemies as fast as you can think about it.

But enough pre-amble, let's take a quick look at the model we have on offer today, and then get down to seeing how the RTX 3050 stacks up against the competition at the worlds most popular resolution.

Technical Specifications

As always with these lower end cards the manufacturer is choosing a very old low card as the comparison point. We'd be more accepting of using the GTX 1650 if the MSRP of the RTX 3050 was even remotely comparable. Surely the GTX 1070 Ti or even a vanilla GTX 1080 is closer? We'll find out in our testing in a moment.