For a while now, there have been indications about the positioning of the RTX 3050 in the Nvidia range. We began to understand that the greens do not really want to keep their GTX range alive. In these conditions, on several occasions, a positioning around a GTX 1660S or 1660Ti has been mentioned for this RTX 3050.
In the last few hours, the first benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 3050 under 3DMark have leaked. The first observation is that this little 3050 is up to 24% faster than the much maligned Radeon RX 6500 XT that AMD has just launched. If we compare it with its big sister RTX 3060, the gap is quite big. The 3060 is up to 46% faster than the RTX 3050 in Time Spy Extreme (in 4K resolution). Under Fire Strike Performance (rendered at 1080p), the difference is about 30%.
RTX 3050: A 1660Ti in 2022?
The performance of the 3050 is really almost identical to the GTX 1660Ti, a card launched in 2019. However, it is difficult to stop there in our analysis. Firstly, because the 3050 has hardware support for raytracing and especially access to DLSS, which fundamentally changes the game in many games. Finally, the crazy situation we are in leads to prices above 400€ to find a 1660Ti today. Announced with a starting price of 279€, we will have to see where the real cursor is and the availability.
