NVIDIA announced their new entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card just a few days ago, at CES this year. Today, we're allowed to publish our reviews: ASUS RTX 3050 STRIX OC, EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black, Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC, and Palit RTX 3050 StormX OC.

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 uses only 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." 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.

Averaged over our whole game test suite at 1080p resolution, we find the RTX 3050 beating the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti. The card is also considerably faster than the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and Radeon RX 5500 XT. The gen-over-gen improvement is 25% (compared to GTX 1650). Last generation's GeForce RTX 2060 is 13% faster, just like the aging Vega 64 and RX 5600 XT. Current-generation products that could be considered a step up in performance are the GeForce RTX 3060 (+36%) and Radeon RX 6600 (+30%). EVGA's RTX 3050 XC Black is clocked at reference-design speeds and power levels, but the company also offers variants that come overclocked out of the box.

With those performance results, the GeForce RTX 3050 is a good choice for 1080p Full HD gaming at highest settings. There are a few titles in our games list that don't hit 60 FPS, sacrificing a few details settings here will get you over 60 easily, though. This is in contrast to the RX 6500 XT, which requires settings to be reduced much more drastically to achieve the same goal. While AMD is executing most of its ray tracing in shaders, NVIDIA has dedicated hardware units for it. These are included on the RTX 3050, too, with impressive results when compared to the RX 6500 XT—it's really night and day. However, that doesn't mean you can get a convincing high-end ray tracing experience from the RTX 3050, not even at Full HD—the hardware capabilities are simply too limited. To achieve 60 FPS at 1080p with RT enabled, you must enable DLSS (or FSR), which brings with it a loss in image quality. Another option could be to reduce certain details, like shadows, tessellation, and textures. Given what ray tracing currently offers, I'm not convinced I'd be willing to make either of those trades. It's not a big deal, though. In my opinion, ray tracing isn't the most important capability to have in this segment; rather, you want to be able to enjoy your games at decent framerates with rasterization settings maxed out, or close to maxed, to justify why you didn't just buy a console instead.

EVGA's GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black is a highly compact version of the RTX 3050 that ticks at baseline specs. Visually, I like what EVGA has done with the card; the different surface textures combine nicely to create a high-quality product. I only wish they had included a backplate, too. While it's very compact, the EVGA cooler works well and reaches good temperatures of only 60°C. Noise levels are a tad bit high with 33 dBA. It would have been easy to tune the fan curve for slightly higher temperatures with much lower noise output. Given the acoustic results of other cards tested today, I'm a bit surprised noise levels are relatively high across the board—the Radeons we tested recently do much better here. Idle fan-stop has become a standard capability lately, I'm happy to report that the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black turns off its fans completely during idle, desktop work, and media playback.

Energy efficiency is roughly comparable to that of other graphics cards on the market, sitting in the middle of our test group—no surprises here. Overclocking, on the other hand, worked quite well. While AMD keeps artificially limiting overclocking potential, NVIDIA doesn't do such a thing, and it pays off. We achieved a significant overclock within minutes, which turned into a 10% real-life performance gain, which is an especially welcome improvement in this segment.

NVIDIA has announced a $249 MSRP price point for the GeForce RTX 3050, which the EVGA XC Black matches. Of course, any such pricing is a fantasy, just like AMD's $199 price point for the RX 6500 XT. In reality, we're expecting the RTX 3050 to sell for around $500, and the RX 6500 XT sits at around $350 at the moment. If you can find the RTX 3050 at or near its MSRP, up to $400 or so, it'll be a fantastic deal, better than anything on the market currently. At our expected $500 price point, there are several notable alternatives. For example, the Radeon RX 6600 for $570, which is considerably faster with slightly better price/performance. Used RTX 2060 cards are selling for well over $550; I'd prefer a $500 RTX 3050 any day. Last generation's GTX 1660/1660 Ti could be an option, but be aware that these lack support for DLSS. While we're seeing a lot of titles with AMD FSR these days, which is supported on all hardware from all vendors, I do feel like having support for DLSS and FSR could come in handy, giving you more choice when you have to rely on upscaling to achieve better FPS.

Last but not least, there's still AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has gotten a lot of bad press lately for its terrible design choices. You still can't deny that the card is more affordable and works relatively well for entry-level 1080p gaming as long as you have support for PCIe 4.0. These are terrible times for the GPU market. Just a few years ago, this same kind of performance was offered for $200, and vendors were happy to make a sale. Today, not much has improved in terms of performance, just pricing has gone way way up, but no amount of moaning or crying will change the situation. It'll be interesting to see what happens with stock levels, whether NVIDIA's mining-limiter on RTX 3050 will hold or miners will snatch up all the inventory. The GeForce RTX 3050 will be available from stores starting tomorrow, in the morning for the US and afternoon for Europe.