Introduction

We have with us the Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC, the company's premium custom-design graphics card based on NVIDIA's swanky new RTX 3060 Ti Ampere performance-segment GPU. The Palit GamingPro OC combines the RTX 3060 Ti with a powerful triple-slot cooling solution meant for a segment above, which aims to trade cooling performance for lower noise. As the most affordable RTX 30-series GPU at launch, the RTX 3060 Ti Ampere is designed to bring the 2nd generation RTX technology to a wider audience.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is designed to introduce 1440p gaming with RTX real-time raytracing enabled, as well as 1080p e-sports gaming with high refresh-rates of 144 Hz. NVIDIA is comparing the RTX 3060 Ti to the previous-generation RTX 2080 Super, a $700 graphics card that fits this bill exactly. The GeForce Ampere architecture heralds NVIDIA's 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology, which combines traditional raster 3D with raytraced elements, such as lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination, and with Ampere, even raytraced motion-blur.



NVIDIA carved the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Ampere out of the same 8 nm GA104 silicon as the RTX 3070 by enabling 38 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors. This works out to 4,864 Ampere CUDA cores, 152 3rd generation Tensor cores, 38 2nd generation RT cores, 152 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. It features the same 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory interface as the RTX 3070. The 2nd generation RTX combines new Ampere CUDA cores that offer concurrent FP32+INT32 math operations with 2nd generation RT cores, which offer higher BVH traversal and intersection performance, along with new hardware that enabled raytraced motion blur; and the new 3rd generation Tensor core that leverages the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to improve AI inference performance by an order of magnitude.

The Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 1800 MHz (compared to the 1665 MHz reference). This is backed by a close-to-reference custom board design that pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors and looks to have been carried over from the company's RTX 3070-based GamingPro product. The cooling solution features a pair of aluminium fin-stack heatsinks with four nickel-plated copper heat pipes, which are ventilated by a trio of 90 mm fans. Palit is unsure about the actual market pricing of the RTX 3060 Ti GamingPro OC, but expect it to be around $440 or $450, possibly higher depending on the supply situation. I used $450 for the charts in this review.