Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a solid video card, if the price is right

Nvidia wants you to replace your old GTX 1060 already for 1080p gaming. That’s no surprise, considering that graphics processor has been around since 2016. 

The company hopes its AI-driven DLSS upscaling (for faster frame rates at a given resolution) will be more attractive in the new entry-level RTX 3060 than it ever did in the meh RTX 2060 line it replaces. It’s not a bad bet; DLSS had severe performance drawbacks in the Turing generation of GPUs, but the 30-series’ Ampere silicon makes it worth it on occasion. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to buy a graphics card right now because of supply shortages. That will be especially true for the RTX 3060, which has an attractive starting price of $329 (£299, about AU$530). It begins shipping today, but good luck finding one in stock for a while. 

Shortages are pervading the graphics card market due to a boom in cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia’s attempted to combat that for the RTX 3060 by sticking a poison pill inside the driver: If it detects you’re mining using Ethereum, it throttles back the performance for mining-related operations. Nvidia says this shouldn’t affect gaming.

Even if that works (and I expect it to be circumvented quickly), the shortage of graphics cards in general has driven the prices for available cards and GDDR6 memory way up. So it’s unlikely that we’ll see any RTX 3060-based cards available for less than $350. There’s no Nvidia-branded Founders Edition card for the RTX 3060 either, and the Founders Editions are usually the only ones that sell for the starting price because Nvidia controls the pricing rather than third-party card makers. 

Plus, a lot still rides on how the shortage affects the price gap between this processor and its step-up sibling, the RTX 3060 Ti, which delivers significantly better performance in many cases. AMD is making an announcement on March 4, which likely will be its own entry-level GPUs in the Radeon RX 6000 series.

It’s not just the price that can make the RTX 3060 attractive. It’s smaller, and it’s rated to draw 170 watts compared to the 200 watts (or more) of its siblings. That means it’s more likely to be compatible with the smaller power supplies of older systems and fit into cases with lesser cooling capabilities. You’ll probably see it quite a bit in prebuilt small or just-above-$1,000 gaming PCs. 

The RTX 3060 comes with 12GB GDDR6 graphics memory, while the 3060 Ti and 3070 only have 8GB and the 3080 10GB. But it also has a smaller memory pipe than the others — 192 bit versus 256 bit or better — and my guess is it probably needs more memory because it can’t get the data in and out as fast. However, the RTX 3060 also debuts Nvidia’s support for PCIe Resizable BAR technology, which has the potential to compensate by enhancing memory transfer speeds, especially for large textures.    

The EVGA card I tested delivered excellent 1080p performance at high-plus quality settings. For many games it should also excel at 1440p, even without DLSS. It was stable even with the prerelease drivers. Since photo editing is still CPU- and memory-bound rather than GPU-bound, it also makes a good midrange choice for moderately intensive imaging work that occasionally uses GPU-accelerated filters and AI (such as Photoshop’s Neural Filters). 

Performance snapshot

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