The RTX 3050 offers similar performance to the GTX 1660 Ti, plus hardware support for ray tracing.
NVIDIA will launch its GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card on January 27, which is Thursday. In terms of performance, the company has already reassured everyone: huge surprise, this RTX 3050 does much better than the GTX 1650 / 1050 in ray tracing… for more complete and less biased tests, see you Wednesday at 3 p.m. In the meantime, here is data from 3DMark where NVIDIA’s entry-level card compares to AMD’s, the new Radeon RX 6500 XT.
The GeForce RTX 3050 achieves scores of 15,843 points, 6166 and 2801 points in FireStrike, TimeSpy and TimeSpy Extreme respectively. As you will clearly see in the table below, these results are very close to those obtained by the GTX 1660 Ti. The Radeon RX 6500 XT scores 15,260 points in FireStrike, 4,970 points in TimeSpy and 2,270 points in TimeSpy Extreme.
| Benchmark | FireStrike 1080p | TimeSpy | TimeSpy Extreme | Fire Strike (%) | Time Spy Extreme (%) |
| GeForce RTX 3060 | 20 523 | 8783 | 4111 | 130 % | 147 % |
| GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | 16 774 | 6360 | 2882 | 106 % | 103 % |
| GeForce RTX 3050 | 15 843 | 6166 | 2801 | 100 % | 100 % |
| Radeon RX 6500 XT | 15 260 | 4970 | 2270 | 96 % | 81 % |
NVIDIA has quietly raised the prices of its GeForce RTX 3000 Founders Edition
A cheaper card than the GTX 1660 Ti currently?
Provided that the price of 279 euros is respected, the GeForce RTX 3050 could represent a “good deal” in these times of GPU scarcity: the GTX 1660 Ti is trading around 500 or even 600 euros now. Moreover, NVIDIA reportedly plans more stock at launch than other RTX 3000 SKUs. Also, according to some, this graphics card would not be not the most profitable to mine (they mention 13.66 MH/s at 57 W). You can find the specifications of the RTX 3050 compared to those of the RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6500 XT in the table below.
| Reference | GeForce RTX 3060 | GeForce RTX 3050 | Radeon RX 6500 XT |
| GPU | GA106-400 | GA106-150 | Ships 24 XT |
| Hearts MIRACLES / Stream processors | 3584 | 2560 | 1024 |
| RT Cores / Ray accelerators | 28 | 20 | 16 |
| Cœurs Tensor | 112 | 80 | – |
| VRAM | 12 Go GDDR6 | 8 Go GDDR6 | 4 Go GDDR6 |
| Memory speed | 15 Gbit/s | 14 Gbit/s | 18 Gbit/s |
| Memory bus | 192-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 360 Go/s | 224 Go/s | 144 Go/s |
| TGP/TBP | 170W | 130W | 107W |
| MSRP | 335 euros | 279 euros | 299 euros |
| Release date | 25/02/21 | 27/01/22 | 19/01/22 |
Source : VideoCardz