As a result, at first, the new video cards caused gamers a solid delight, then when the official prices appeared, it was time to grab the heart. A couple of thousand dollars for just running around in a past-gen game like Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin's Creed Valhalla in high resolution and a beautiful reflection from puddles? Comrades, game designers and graphics card manufacturers, are you serious? Therefore, most gamers have been hiding in anticipation of the announcement of the "people's" RTX 3060 Ti, which has been flashing on numerous insiders for a couple of months. Towards the end of the year, the announcement happened, the first swallows flew to the shelves of stores, and we finally had the opportunity to touch the "low-cost" card with the vaunted DLSS and ray tracing.

What is interesting about the 3060 Ti

Like its older brothers, the new 3060 Ti is based on the new NVIDIA Ampere core, which has made an impressive leap in performance compared to the Turing family. The transition to an 8-nm process technology, new streaming multiprocessors with third-generation tensor cores and GDDR6X memory allowed the older cards of the series to achieve unprecedented performance in the region of 30 TFLOPS. The RTX 3060 Ti itself is based on the GA104 core with 4864 stream processors, 152 texture blocks, 80 rendering blocks and 38 ray tracing cores. The video memory is connected to the core using a 256-bit bus, its frequency is 448 GB/s, and the volume rests on 8 GB optimal by current standards.


Just make a reservation right away that the hype around new products is still crazy, only a few units have reached the stores, and the price tags are still far from the stated "$399 + taxes". In fact, right now we are seeing a two-fold surcharge, which does not really lend itself to any logic, so your cap recommends just testing the ground and getting to know the new product closer, and planning an upgrade for the end of spring or the beginning of summer, when this game will return to normal.

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MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING X TRIO 
 
Efficient cooling, low noise, passive operation, performance at the level of GeForce RTX 2080 Super, DLSS activation sometimes works wonders.
 
 
Dimensions and weight, shortage, godless margins at the start of sales.
 

The first card that visited our review was a representative of the middle class MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING X TRIO with a triple cooler and additional factory overclocking of the GPU. In comparison with the reference values of 1665 MHz, its core speed was raised to 1830 MHz, and the memory frequency was left at the same level of 14000 Mhz. To power this good, NVIDIA recommends using power supplies with a power of 650 Watts instead of 550, since additional power is required for factory overclocking.

This design is cooled by the traditional triple cooler TRI FROZR, which we have seen a bunch of times in other MSI GAMING TRIO video cards. MSI itself says that thanks to the new wave-like contours of the turntables and the direct contact of the heat pipes with the GPU crystal, the new Cooling system will seriously impress customers. And you know, they didn't lie. In 2D mode, the system switches to a semi-passive silent mode, and under heavy load, the core temperature does not exceed 68 degrees Celsius, and the fan rotation speed rarely reaches 1000 revolutions per minute. We tried with all our might to put her on the shoulder blades with Cyberpunk, but the rustle of the fans was barely audible against the background of the CPU cooler and the PSU fan. On the other hand, all this stuff weighs almost one and a half kilograms and definitely requires a reliable attachment in the case. But we are, for a second, talking about the youngest graphics card in the line.

And now let's check what this baby is capable of in battle. As our post-New Year tests have shown, it easily pulls out any 2K games with the graphics settings sliders twisted all the way out. It will be heavier with 4K, but the new DLSS supersampling function works unexpectedly well here. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077 with maximum settings, DLSS allows you to almost double the number of FPS from an unpleasant 28 frames per second to an optimal 59 FPS. Even more strange is that the inclusion of ray tracing, which puts any graphics card on the ass, with DLSS turned on, has a much less noticeable effect on performance. However, both technologies are still difficult to call mass, so the results in different games may vary greatly.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards

Test results

We will test in 5-6 popular titles with varying degrees of optimization. We measured all the games in three different resolutions (Full HD, 2K, 4K) with the maximum possible graphics settings, anti-aliasing and other charms. DLSS and tracing were not included because Radeon video cards do not have them, and NVIDIA does, but they behave unpredictably in every game. The graphs show not the maximum, but the average FPS value.

Test stand:

As you can see, the new product from NVIDIA handles perfectly with modern games in 2K resolution. In 4K, there will be no pure ultra, you will have to reset to medium-high and conjure with DLSS. There's nothing to say about Full HD. If you forget for a second about the horse margins that you had to face because of the shortage, then it's just wow, comrades! The younger model of the new generation with an official price tag of $ 400 in all respects bypasses yesterday's leader GeForce RTX 2080 Super. When will you see this again? We hope that in the next six months the deficit will come to naught, prices will settle down and we will be able to call it a people's graphics card at least with a stretch.