“Budget graphics card” remains an oxymoronic term here in 2022, but it all depends on where you draw the budget line. At least on list price, Nvidia is making an effort: Its GeForce RTX 3050 desktop GPU, launching today, starts with cards at an ostensible $249 list price, and it’s the new GPU that has impressed us the most in 2022 so far (mind you, of just two). We tested it in the form of EVGA’s GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G, one of a host of RTX 3050 cards launching today.
As a ray-tracing engine, the card performs surprisingly well, keeping price-for-performance pace with the GeForce RTX 3060, and it sometimes clears the 1440p/60-frames-per-second hurdle that many gamers aim to jump. The EVGA tops both the venerable GeForce GTX 1060 and the $159-list Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super in testing almost universally, the latter a card launched in November of 2019. Its main competition, the $199 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT that launched last week to lukewarm reviews, isn’t always as far behind as it should be, but our testing shows the RTX 3050 to be the new standing performance leader in its class. We can’t predict how much stock Nvidia’s card partners will be able to serve up. But given its Editors’ Choice-award-winning performance, we don’t expect stocks of RTX 3050 cards to last long, at least at the outset. Gamers who play at 1080p or 1440p should get one while they’re hot.
The RTX Badge Takes a Step Down
Until today, the lowest-end discrete desktop graphics card that you could buy from Nvidia with both Tensor and ray-tracing (RT) cores on board was the GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edition, which originally went on sale for an MSRP of $349 back in January of 2019. This was before the full effects of the current crypto craze and the pandemic put a squeeze on GPU supply up and down the market. Today, with just inflation considered, the RTX 2060 would be a card that sells for roughly $380 in early-2022 US dollars.
Of course, list prices are just a pipe dream these days, in graphics card land. On eBay, an RTX 2060 Founders Edition runs between $400 and $600, depending on the seller and the number of bids. At least on paper, that would make the MSRP of the new EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G a steal at “just” $249.99. (Whether you can find one at that price from a first-party seller is another matter.) Things have gotten so constrained on the supply side even the RTX 3050’s spiritual predecessor, the GTX 1650, was recently released back onto the market in an effort by Asus to add to the available stock.
So, given those market conditions, there’s a chance the RTX 3050 will end up closer to $500 or $600 given current trends at this power tier. Then again, the end to GPU supply-side squeezes may soon be in sight, as crypto prices have spent the past month collectively crashing across the board, which always affects lower-end GPUs’ prices first. As crypto prices fall, the profit viability of cards with smaller VRAM caches falls in tandem, creating a “fire sale” mentality in the mining community for all but the highest-end cards that still yield decent hash rates.
It generally takes a few months for gamers to see the cards available for purchase, as minor corrections don’t trigger immediate hardware sell-offs; we’ll need a true crypto crash for that. Just last week we saw signs that the wave may finally be cresting, though, as a variety of Radeon RX 6500 XT cards were available for almost an hour after initial launch on Newegg, opposed to the few minutes that it usually takes for bots to hoover up everything in sight. We can’t say with certainty whether this extended stay on shelves was the result of its 4GB of VRAM being unattractive to miners, or its middling gaming performance being unattractive to gamers, or just Newegg’s anti-bot measures doing their job. But whatever the case, a new GPU was available for more of an hour after launch in 2022. As bonkers as that sounds, that’s a step in the right direction, supply-wise.
Speaking of low-end options lacking appeal to miners, many GPU followers out there might be asking: What, no RTX 2050? While we never saw Nvidia extend the RTX brand down into the “xx50” segment before today, now there’s some confusing news on the horizon. According to a recent report, Nvidia will be producing RTX 2050 chips, but they’re not set to release until after the RTX 3050 today. Not only that, but the RTX 2050 will be a laptop-only GPU that, stick with us, will reportedly be based on the same Nvidia GA106 die used in the RTX 3050.
That doesn’t make 100% sense to us, either, but what does sanity even look like in the GPU space these days, really? The launch of the desktop version of the RTX 3050 is also odd in that it follows the laptop release by a considerable margin, launching months after the mobile RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 were made available in gaming laptops from MSI (like the MSI Katana GF66 recently reviewed), Acer, and the like.
Hopefully this spec chart clears things up a bit on what we can expect out of the desktop version of the RTX 3050…
The first thing you might notice is that massive transistor count. The GA106 die has proven itself immensely flexible for Nvidia, scaling all the way up to its RTX A2000 line of professional-graphics GPUs (successors to the Quadro line), down to its mobile RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 line of laptop GPUs. This accounts for that 276mm^2 footprint inside such a tiny card, and although we can only speculate why Nvidia decided to include the more expensive die in such an inexpensive segment, some outlets have tried to answer the question.
In almost every respect except maximum boost clock, the base specs for the GeForce RTX 3050 GPU showcase a significant lead over the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT reference version, which shares the same specs with the Gigabyte model we benchmarked last week. Its 8GB of VRAM sits right at what many consider to be the new standard for modern PC gaming (4GB is fine, but not preferred by desktop gamers); however, that also puts it in the crosshairs of crypto miners.
Last up is the power requirement, which could prove sticky for budget- or compact-PC builders with lower-rated power supplies. The GTX 1650’s rating was just 75 watts; the RTX 3050 pushes that up to 130 watts, a substantial difference that shouldn’t be overlooked if you’re not sure what sort of power limits your desktop can handle.
A Closer Look: The EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G
GeForce RTX 3050 models will come from Nvidia’s usual card partners. Nvidia hasn’t announced any plans for a discrete Nvidia-branded Founders Edition of the RTX 3050, so a year after its launch, the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition remains lowest-end Founders Edition card issued in the RTX 30 Series lineup. The RTX 3050 is produced on the same 8nm Samsung process as the rest of Nvidia’s Ampere lineup, and it shares its GA106 die production with both the mobile and discrete versions of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060.
The dual-slot, dual-fan EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G is just 7.94 inches long, which is just fine for both builders and upgraders of compact PCs, as well as owners of standard-size rigs. Our test card, though, is just one of many different styles that will be available when RTX 3050 cards go on sale today.
The EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G will share its power requirements with Nvidia’s reference spec at 130 watts, fed to the card via a single eight-pin connector. Those buying more powerful models of the RTX 3050 with higher peak clock speeds applied, or more fans, should expect higher power requirements.
On the port selection for the RTX 3050 model we tested, there’s simply no comparison to the RX 6500 XT. Where that card had just two ports, the back of our EVGA card upholds the RTX 30 Series standard with three DisplayPort 1.4b outputs and one HDMI 2.1 port. That’s a high-end port selection on a lower-end card. And so, onward to testing!
Testing the GeForce RTX 3050: In the 1080p and 1440p Zone
PC Labs ran the EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our test rig, used for all cards in the charts below, is based on an Intel Core i9-10900K processor and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard (an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi). It’s equipped with 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory and a solid-state boot drive. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this platform is the best reasonable configuration at the moment to take the CPU out of the equation for frame rates.
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the RTX 3050’s esports prowess with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our standard benchmark regimen, which tests a GPU’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it does in synthetic tests that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible visual quality preset or settings. If you have a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor and are worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but some of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX Super Resolution compatibility. This can yield performance boosts of up to 40%, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with. (See our guide to these technologies, Sharpen & Speed Up Your PC Games: Testing AMD’s FSR, Nvidia’s DLSS 2.2 & More, for more.)
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down the results below to a specific resolution (i.e., the resolution of the monitor you plan to use), click the other two resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our list of AAA titles includes a mix of recent games, as well as some older but still reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
GeForce RTX 3050 Test Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. In UL’s 3DMark, the circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card’s performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. And 3DMark’s Port Royal, until recently run only on GeForce RTX cards, measures how well a GPU handles ray-tracing tasks (thus the absent bars for most of the AMD Radeon cards). Also here is a pair of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark and LuxMark); more details on those at our how we test page.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is well below the classification of a “workhorse” GPU, and as such we didn’t see too many results here that blew our socks off.
The one testing run of note, however, was the Port Royal pass on 3DMark. Here we saw very strong ray-tracing performance versus the Radeon RX 6500 XT by a matter of multiples. If you want ray-tracing at this price level (which we’re still not totally sold on without DLSS or RSR thrown into the mix, truth be told), though the RTX 3050 commands a $50 premium over the RX 6500 XT, its RT performance is close enough to the $329-list AMD Radeon RX 6600 to warrant a double-take.
GeForce RTX 3050 Test Results: Recent AAA Games
For the following real-world games, we typically benchmark using the highest-quality preset and, if available, DirectX 12.
In many of the AAA tests we ran, the RTX 3050 straddled an odd line where it was regularly pushing above the 1080p/60fps minimum barrier we were expecting out of it, but short of the 1080p/120fps we were hoping for it. Overall, you can expect a 60fps experience with a few settings turned down, but those looking for a high-refresh AAA experience will want to look toward step-up options like the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti instead. (Note the under-60fps scores at 1080p with demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.)
I’ve made the argument in the past that frame-boosting features like DLSS are far more impactful for gamers at the bottom of the stack rather than the top. Having the option to enable modes like “Ultra-Performance” on titles like Death Stranding that could prove too demanding for cards at this power tier might mean the difference between a smooth 60fps experience and a jagged 30fps slideshow on low-end GPUs.
Here, DLSS pushed the RTX 3050 to get nearly as many frames in our 4K test trial as the Radeon RX 6500 XT did in 1440p. It also pushed the game to just over 101fps in 1080p, a 20% increase in performance overall versus the same test without DLSS on.
The card’s 4K performance was mostly under 30fps through most of the titles we tested, so this is not a card for 4K play. It was close enough in some runs, once again, to give AMD and the RX 6600 a reason to check its rearview mirrors.
GeForce RTX 3050 Test Results: Multiplayer Games
Though we max out the eye candy in most of PC Labs’ game tests to push cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about balancing graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we’ve kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, and Final Fantasy 14 tuned to the optimal combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for instance), while still trying to keep 1080p frame rates above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s an ideal target for competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 120Hz or 144Hz (or faster) gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz displays, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips below 60fps, is fine.
This is one arena where the RTX 3050, as a budget-level card, must not miss. Luckily it doesn’t, pushing out results that matched various refresh-rate thresholds up and down the chain. This includes a result good enough for 60Hz panels (61fps) at 4K resolution in Rainbow Six Siege, and just over 165Hz (170fps) in CS:GO at 4K.
GeForce RTX 3050 Test Results: Legacy AAA Titles
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer an enjoyable AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Tomb Raider (2013), Bioshock: Infinite, and Sleeping Dogs.
On these tests, because recent AMD cards stumble at getting competitively high frame rates with legacy games, Nvidia has walked away with the results in this section for going on three years now. If you play games that only support older versions of DirectX, your safest bet remains Big Green’s GeForce cards.
Overclocking and Thermals: Some Real Rev Overhead
Onward to temperature-testing and overclocking the card. We subjected the EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black Gaming 8G to a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal, and the card peaked at a temperature of 63 degrees C. That’s just about right for a card at this power tier, especially considering the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming 12G‘s result of 68 degrees C in the same test.
Most of this heat was collected and dumped into the middle of the backplate, according to what we saw through a FLIR One Pro thermal imaging camera aimed at our testbed during the stress test.
When it came time to overclock the card using MSI’s Afterburner utility, I was able to achieve a stable overclock of 175MHz added to the boost clock, and 195MHz added to the memory clock. This represented a 9.8% increase in clock speed from stock, and resulted in an eerily close 9.7% boost in frames when we tested Far Cry 5 in 1080p, a lead that was extended to nearly 13% when we moved to 1440p. That is a strong result for such a small card.
Nvidia Hits Back at AMD, and Hard
Last week’s Radeon RX 6500 XT launch was a rough one for AMD, with many publications and outlets giving the card a thorough thumping for being overpriced, underpowered, and the new poster child for just how out of control the graphics-card marketplace has become. We at PCMag tried to keep things in the realm of “MSRP dreamland,” if you will, during our review of Gigabyte’s Eagle 4G model. In that review, we noted at least for the time it was released—as in “last week”—the mere fact that it existed and might be in stock somewhere was enough to cut the card some slack.
But the arrival of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 makes any excuses on AMD’s part about the lacking performance of the RX 6500 XT a bit harder to swallow. First and foremost, the RTX 3050 lowers the barrier of entry to both DLSS and RTX, regardless of current or former price surges. Second, for $249 (yes, in MSRP dreamland) its price-to-performance ratio actually manages to do something that few graphics cards have for the past few years: Keep up with expectations. We can shake our fist at the sky all we want, and complain about what this card would have cost back in the old days, and how every crypto kid needs to get off our collective lawn. But this is the state of the market as it stands, and we have to score cards in that world as it is.
Without getting too in the weeds, here’s some light napkin math to consider. Adjusted for inflation, the MSRP of the the GeForce RTX 3050 is about 43% higher than that of the GTX 1650 Super since the latter card was launched in November of 2019. According to our tests, the performance of the RTX 3050 floats anywhere between 30% and 60% faster than the GTX 1650 Super at 1080p resolution. While that is not a 1:1 relative rise in both performance and cost across every test, achieving anything close, with these market conditions in place, is a feat worth the score we’ve given the RTX 3050.
AMD’s latest Radeon GPU release felt like little more than an attempt to placate a desperate market with something that might fill a gap. In contrast, in most of the ways that matter, the RTX 3050 is a logical upgrade to the company’s low-end tier of GPUs. While the price might seem high for the budget set, the card’s performance rates it in all scenarios including ray-tracing, which is a new addition altogether for shoppers at the low end.
Maybe we can return to a more reasonable state of pricing affairs by this time next year. It may be a sad state of affairs, but it’s the one we’ve got until the crypto community runs out of juice. We pray. But for now at least, a $249-list card released in 2022 performs better than a $309-list card from 2019 (the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti we tested), and that by a strong margin. And bringing with it some ray-tracing cred.
If the Radeon RX 6500 XT represented the peak of video-card tulip mania, let’s hope the GeForce RTX 3050 marks the start of a return to a more reasonable reality. It may not be the ultra-budget card that some were hoping for. But its performance elevates the standard for high-performance 1080p gaming while bridging the gap to 1440p play. That’s a feat.
Plus, there’s a chance that the crypto market could have fallen further, between the time this review went live, and when you are reading it. If that happens, the biggest difference between the Radeon RX 6500 XT and the GeForce RTX 3050 will be that only one of them—you guessed it, the latter!—would still be worth its current list price after the digital-currency dust clears.
