Positioning & Architecture
NVIDIA stealth-launched the RTX 3050 6 GB a few weeks ago, just a press release, no reviews. The card caters to the "as cheap as possible, but faster than integrated graphics" segment. Priced at just $180, the new RTX 3050 is quite affordable, much more affordable than all other recent NVIDIA models, which start at $300 and reach much higher. In terms of technology, the card does not use the latest Ada Lovelace architecture, but sticks to the previous generation Ampere, GA107 specifically. GA107 is fabricated at Samsung, using an 8 nanometer process, with a small 200 mm² die, which makes it very cheap to produce, and it won't tax the company's allocation at TSMC either. This makes it an ideal candidate for an entry-level card that will be sold in huge volumes. Unfortunately this means that you're losing out on the newest technologies, too, like DLSS 3 Frame Generation, more on that later. NVIDIA enabled only 2304 cores in the GTX 3050 6 GB, which is a 10% reduction compared to the original RTX 3050. VRAM size is also lowered, from 8 GB to 6 GB, which brings the memory bus down, too. Since there's now three memory chips installed on the card, the bus is 96-bit wide (vs 128-bit on the 8 GB model). While the memory clock has remained at 1750 MHz, the GPU frequency has been reduced to 1470 MHz rated boost, down from 1777 MHz. The power limit is now 70 W, which enables NVIDIA's board partners to release cards that run on slot power only—without any additional PCIe power connectors. This is a very important capability for people who want to upgrade their aging systems, which often have weak PSUs without additional power cables. Running with just slot power is an incredible achievement, especially for a card in this performance class.

Performance
Still, averaged over our whole benchmark suite, the RTX 3050 6 GB can't impress. At 1080p Full HD, it's almost 30% slower than the RTX 3050 8 GB (which requires an 8-pin power cable however). Last-generation's RTX 2060 is 42% (!) faster than the RTX 3050 in today's review, and even GTX 1660 Ti can beat it with a 18% lead. The seven-year old GTX 1060 6 GB isn't that much slower than the RTX 3050 either—the gap is just 20%. Intel's Arc A580 isn't exactly known for being a fast card, yet it's almost 70% faster than the RTX 3050, and the slowest new card from AMD, the RX 7600 non-XT, offers double the performance, just like NVIDIA's slowest GeForce 40 series card, the RTX 4060 non-Ti. Looking at individual game results, it becomes apparent that there's no way that you can expect 60 FPS at Full HD with maximized details, unless you're running lighter titles such as Counter-Strike 2. However, that doesn't mean that all hope is lost for the RTX 3050. If you're willing to dial down settings, you'll be able to get much closer to 60 FPS, and once you enable upscaling via DLSS or FSR, you'll cross 60 FPS in almost all titles.

While not included in our test group, performance versus other slot-only power cards is SO much better, these others really are borderline useless for contemporary gaming. For example, the Radeon RX 6400 is roughly half as fast as RTX 3050, the GT 1030 is more like one tenth the performance. GTX 1050 Ti is just half the performance of RTX 3050 6 GB and GTX 1650 non-Ti is around 30% slower.

DLSS, FSR and Frame Generation
Just like the other GeForce 30 cards, the RTX 3050 6 GB has support for NVIDIA DLSS 2, but it lacks DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Having DLSS 2 available is an important feature, because it means you can enable upscaling in more titles than with an AMD Radeon or Intel Arc card. While AMD's FSR is hardware agnostic, there's still a significant number of titles that support only DLSS, and not FSR/XeSS. The lack of DLSS 3 Frame Generation is extremely unfortunate, because it would be a good way to further boost the FPS—without any loss in image quality, which is very important at 1080p. While games are still extremely playable with the highest-FPS DLSS/FSR Ultra Performance setting (in terms of gameplay), the loss in image quality is pretty significant though. I did try running with FSR 3 Frame Generation, but the added latency made the experience quite terrible, unless you're running at a base FPS of 50+, which is pretty hard to reach with this card. AMD has been working on Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), which promises to enable frame generation in all games (on Radeon cards only), but so far I'm not that impressed—especially at low FPS the artifacts are pretty noticeable. What really would have made a difference would have been if NVIDIA had released a GeForce 40-based entry-level card, letting you enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation. This feature makes the $300 RTX 4060 a highly desirable choice for all upscaling scenarios.

VRAM Size
The new RTX 3050 variant comes with 6 GB VRAM, which is definitely suboptimal for several games in our test group, but you have to consider that we're running at maximized settings. Once you lower the details, which you must to reach decent FPS, then VRAM size should be almost a non-issue. I still would have loved to see 8 GB on the card—AMD gave us 8 GB VRAM on the six-year old RX 580 which sells for less than $100 these days. Intel's Arc A580 is the strongest modern alternative to the RTX 3050 and that offers 8 GB, too, which is an important psychological win, especially with less educated buyers, simply because "8 is more than 6." No doubt, at higher resolutions, or with ray tracing enabled, 6 GB is definitely an issue, but at this point you're running at less than 20 FPS, which means lowered settings and upscaling are required to be at least some bit playable—both of which lower VRAM usage considerably.

Ray Tracing
Sprinkling RT effects on top of your game graphics comes with a serious performance hit—making little sense when you're not even hitting 60 FPS, even with RT disabled. We still tested ray tracing, and while it works, it's definitely not useful for a card in this performance class. For AMD that's good news, because their weaker RT implementation shouldn't factor into your buying decision, rather focus on pricing and pure raster performance. Given the fidelity of today's RT effects, I also don't see a reason to do something like 1080p lowest settings with DLSS Ultra Performance just to enable ray tracing for slightly improved lighting, reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion—which will be barely visible because of the low render resolution and all the shimmering from the upscaler.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
Gainward's RTX 3050 Pegasus is a cost-optimized version of the RTX 3050 6 GB, which is exactly the reason why I bought this specific model. Pricing is essential in this segment and there's no reason people should spend extra money on fancy cards with bigger coolers and factory overclocks. While the cooler doesn't look impressive at all—it's just a slab of metal without heatpipes—it's perfectly sufficient for the heat output of the card. Remember, the card is designed to operate within a 70 W power budget, meaning the GPU doesn't put out a lot of heat. Our thermal testing confirms that temperatures are very low, reaching just 64°C at full load. Noise levels are even more impressive, the card runs at a whisper-quiet 23 dBA, even during long gaming sessions. At this noise level you will have a hard time noticing the card in a quiet room with everything turned off, making it an excellent choice for a media center PC. The noise that your clothes make when moving will overpower the card's acoustics easily. When installed in a case, there's no way you'd ever heat the card's fan, especially not when there's other actively cooled components like the CPU or the PSU—a fast mechanical HDD is louder at idle. I did try running the card completely passively, but that's not possible in gaming. The card does include the highly popular idle-fan-stop capability, which shuts the fans off in idle, productivity and Internet browsing. I also tested watching a 4K video on YouTube—the fan never turned on, even after an hour or two of playback. Compared to other alternatives in this segment, this makes the RTX 3050 the clear winner in terms of power/heat/noise. All other cards consume a lot more power, which means more heat output, resulting in more fan noise.

Power Consumption
As mentioned before, the RTX 3050 6 GB runs with PCIe slot power only, the board power limit is set to 70 W, manual power limit increases are not allowed. At this power level there simply is nothing else on the market that's quite as modest—everything else is 100 W+. Some of the interesting alternatives that offer much better gaming performance aren't doing so well when it comes to power: GTX 1060: 111 W, RTX 2060: 165 W, RX 580: 200 W, Arc A580: 210 W. This doesn't mean that RTX 3050's efficiency is off the charts. While it is the most efficient Ampere card that we've ever tested, it still falls behind the modern GeForce 40 series and most of the Radeon RX 7000 cards, roughly matching RX 7600, RTX 4060 and RX 7700 XT. It's still impressive that NVIDIA managed to bring power consumption of GA107 down to these levels, at the cost of quite some performance, too, of course.

Overclocking
Overclocking worked very well on our card, looks like there's a lot of headroom on both the GPU and memory. This makes sense, if you consider that the goal was to build an efficient card that fits into a 70 W power budget. Interestingly we were still able to gain 14% in real-life performance, even without raising the power limit, which is not possible. This helps the card make up lost ground to the RTX 3050 8 GB, but it still can't touch it. If you're willing to play with overclocking, there's definitely something to be gained here.

Pricing & Alternatives
I couldn't find an official MSRP for the RTX 3050 6 GB, and there is no reference design card or Founders Edition either. Going by the various store listings it seems like the base price is $180, which is a refreshing change from the $500-$1000 price points that we're used to seeing these days. At sub-$200 the card definitely stands out in today's market, making it a potential choice for many buyers—which is exactly why I bought the card for review myself—to give you a definitive answer what to expect. While the absolute price point is certainly interesting, even at $180 the card is very expensive for what it offers—look at our Performance per Dollar charts. Even current-generation midrange cards offer similar or better value, which is always a red flag for a new release with much lower performance. Right now the strongest alternative is the Intel Arc A580 which currently sells for $165. You get much better performance and 8 GB VRAM, too. On the other hand the Intel card's power requirements are much higher, but most somewhat decent power supplies will handle it just fine. Intel's driver team has been making huge progress in recent months, and sometimes even beats NVIDIA and AMD with their first-day driver releases.

Used Market
If you're willing to consider used cards then the older Radeon RX 5700 XT would be my first pick. While it's not nearly as good in terms of power/heat/noise, it's just $20 more expensive for a doubling (!) in performance. Sure, you're not getting support for ray tracing, and there's no DLSS either, but twice the base FPS beats DLSS any day. AMD does provide full day-one driver support for the RX 5700 XT, the legacy drivers are still two generations away, which should be a year or more at least. If you want the cheapest possible gaming option, then consider the Radeon RX 580. While it's old and requires you to run the AMD legacy drivers, the performance is not that much slower than RTX 3050, but at half the price—just $90. A slightly more modern alternative is the Radeon RX 6600 non-XT for $200, but I'd probably still lean towards the RX 5700 XT. If you can up your budget then RTX 4060 non-Ti is probably your best choice. While it costs $300 (or +67%), you get +101% performance and support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. If you don't care about DLSS, then the Radeon RX 7600 non-XT could be worth considering: twice as fast, too, but only $250. Once the price of RTX 3050 6 GB drops to below $150, then the card could become interesting, until then, definitely consider the alternatives, unless you really need a 70 W card that runs without an additional power cable.