Zotac GeForce RTX 3050

The GeForce RTX 3050 is based on the NVIDIA GA106 graphics processor, which is used on the RTX 3060, too. Physically, the chip has 3840 cores, out of which 2560 are active on the RTX 3050. NVIDIA is also including 8 GB of GDDR6 over a 128-bit wide memory interface—twice that of the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which is 4 GB GDDR6 with 64-bit. While the RTX 3060 connects to the host system over a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface, the RTX 3050 only uses a x8 link. While that's twice as much as the x4 RX 6500 XT, it's still a surprising, artificial design choice. According to NVIDIA, this improves supply, allowing them "to source a wider variety of chips for the life of the product," which translates to "we want to build the RTX 3050 with the GA107, too, but that's only x8, so we'll limit all RTX 3050 cards to x8." As part of our RTX 3050 launch testing, we ran a whole round of testing at PCI-Express 3.0 x8 to get a feel for what kind of performance loss you can expect on an older motherboard. With just 1–2% depending on game and resolution, the differences are negligible.

Well, there’s nothing much to complain about this card actually. I don’t have a high expectation of the performance when I first started the tests but I’m not disappointed with what it can deliver. Performance-wise, it’s not at the same level as the RTX 2060, that’s for sure. While its raster performance is a bit more powerful than the GTX 1660 SUPER, the main highlight here is mainly the ray tracing and DLSS capabilities. Personally, I think that even if you don’t play with ray tracing enabled, the DLSS is one useful feature that can give you a performance boost in games that support this feature. The final retail price might not be as affordable as the MSRP stated during the official launch ($249 or 1200MYR) but compared to the competing RX 6500XT that comes with almost the same price, the 8GB memory, seemingly reasonable ray tracing performance, and DLSS on this card is already a win. All in all, it’s a pretty decent entry-level 1080P ‘RTX ON’ graphics card for those who are planning to upgrade from cards like the GTX 1050 Ti or lower.