An advantage of this however is a 24% drop in power use to just 130 watts, meaning a basic 550-watt power supply will be more than sufficient to power an RTX 3050 gaming system. Even at 1440p, the RTX 3050 managed well over 60 fps and this made it 9% faster than the RTX 2060, and 35% faster than the 6500 XT, a great result given the current market. If that's the case, then you're best off being upsold to the RX 6600, or perhaps the smarter option would be to look for a cheaper second hand option to tie you over.

Starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, using the medium quality preset at 1080p, we find that the RTX 3050 is good for 79 fps on average, so here it's basically a GTX 1660 Super. That made it 18% faster than the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0, and 30% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration. It was also only 8% slower than the RTX 2060, a decent result overall.Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Those 2,560 CUDA cores in the RTX 3050 are split between 20 SMs which also then delivers 20 RT cores and 80 Tensor cores. It's those last two specs that separate the RTX 3050 from its GTX 1660 Ti brethren and ought to make it a far more tempting choice for the mainstream gamer. The RT cores are what allow for ray tracing and the Tensor Cores then allow you to enable DLSS to make ray tracing actually playable at a decent frame rate, all thanks to the magic of AI-powered super sampling.

Even at 1440p the 6500 XT hangs in there averaging 64 fps against the RTX 3050's 79 fps, which made the GeForce GPU 23% faster and given the price difference, even at MSPR, that's a decent result for AMD. As we often saw, the 1440p data is even more brutal for the 6500 XT. Here the RTX 3050 was 54% faster, or 85% faster when comparing PCIe 3.0 performance. The RTX 3050 also averaged 74 fps, meaning it was more often than not good for over 60 fps at 1440p using respectable quality settings in many titles. Ray Tracing Performance Whereas the 6500 XT dropped performance by 13% with PCIe 3.0, we see no change for the RTX 3050. So gamers limited to a PCIe 3.0 platform (which as of writing is likely a majority), the RTX 3050 is going to be significantly faster. With the 6500 XT currently selling for at least 35% over the MSRP, we're expecting the RTX 3050 to come in at a much larger 80% premium, but hopefully it will be less than that.

RTX 3050 at Ebuyer

We don't feel the RTX 3050's rasterization performance is powerful enough to justify turning ray traced effects on, but you can, and some of you might want to anyway, so let's take a look. For those of you wondering why we are comparing with the RX 6600 and not the 6500 XT for the ray tracing benchmark, we simply didn't want to be so cruel. Seriously though, the 6500 XT is so weak with ray tracing enabled that the data isn't useful for comparison. Cost Per Frame