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(Image: PCMag.com)
Nvidia's "budget friendly" Ampere GPU has finally arrived in the course of the RTX 3050. It's intended to deliver both ray tracing and DLSS support to the mass market. The swan song for Ampere will officially go on auction January 27th, and reviews went live today that testify the card offers peachy 1080p performance for its $249 MSRP. Unfortunately that's not the cost it will be sold for, bold you tin can even discover ane in stock.

For a refresher the RTX 3050 is essentially a cut-down 3060, and uses the same GA106 die from that $329 GPU. Despite being a watered downwardly version of its big brother, it still has decent specs for an entry level GPU. It isn't castrated like the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which launched concluding calendar week to online mockery. The RTX 3050 has 8GB of VRAM, compared to 4GB on the Radeon, and it comes with a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface, compared to merely an x4 link on the AMD GPU. Its has a 128-bit wide memory bus likewise, compared to the skinny 64-bit charabanc on the 6500XT, though this terminal is somewhat mitigated by the 16MB of L3 cache on the RDNA2 GPU. The RTX 3050's specs are unsurprising; it's a standard 1080p high settings GPU, with the added benefit of beingness able to theoretically use Nvidia'south ray tracing and DLSS in games that back up it.

(Image: PCMag.com)

Overall, the card mostly delivers on its promise of offering 60fps at Ultra settings in AAA titles. Unlike the Radeon carte, which is held back by its lack of VRAM and narrow retentiveness charabanc, the RTX 3050 tin run the latest games at maximum detail, either nigh 60fps or beyond, depending on the game in question. PCMag.com tested the menu using an Intel Core i9-10900K CPU, which notably has a PCIe iii.0 interface, but plant it made lilliputian difference. This was a sticking point with the Radeon card, as its x4 interface hindered its performance on PCIe 3.0 by upward to 36 percent. In their gauntlet of AAA titles the card was able to soar beyond 60fps in every championship except two: Assassin'south Creed Odyssey and Ruby Dead Redemption two, where information technology scored 54fps and 49fps, respectively. That'south still pretty decent, assuming in one case again, that this is a $250 GPU. This is not the GPU for 1080p gaming at loftier refresh rates notwithstanding, unless you play older games from several years ago (no sentence) or games that aren't also graphically enervating like Fortnite.

Generally speaking, the RTX 3050 performs about the same as the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti, which came out two years agone. The big departure this time around is that the GTX 1660 Ti can't do ray tracing or DLSS. The RTX 3050 can. In PCMag'southward testing using the synthetic Port Royal benchmark, the 3050 scored 3,565 compared to 548 for the Radeon RX 6500 XT, and a big fatty goose egg for the GTX 1660 Ti. PC Gamer besides noted that the 3050 offers "playable ray tracing" on games that offer both ray tracing and DLSS, with the latter required to help boost frame rates to adequate levels.

All in all, this is some pretty good news for folks stranded with older GPUs. But hither's the bad news, which you already knew was coming. Every bit has been the case for every single GPU launch in the by two years, nobody knows if the cards volition be in stock anywhere, or what their bodily price will be. Tom'due south Hardware posted a list of all the RTX 3050s that volition be bachelor from Nvidia's partners, and some of them are launchingwith ludicrous pricing built-in. As an instance: Though Asus is offering a deal bin $249 version, its overclocked versions will be offered at an insane $439 and $489. Gigabyte and MSI are also charging an exorbitant $379 for their overclocked versions too.

(Paradigm: Tom'south Hardware)

This leaves usa with the usual caveats pointed out in the headline, and all reviews online. If you can observe one for MSRP or close to it, don't fifty-fifty hesitate because it'southward likely if you lot take five minutes to mull information technology over information technology'll be out of stock by the time y'all try to add together information technology to your cart. That's assuming you can even find i in stock. We shall observe out what the situation is on the 27th, but given the carte du jour's 8GB of RAM and relatively low price, it'll likely be snatched up by miners rather quickly.

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