Nvidia RTX 3060 review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

The 3060 benchmarking marathon continues as we grapple with Far Cry 5, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Death Stranding and Hitman 2. There's an even split between games that use the DX11 and DX12 APIs here, with Ubisoft's open world titles on the older DX11 and the rest on DX12, allowing us to see how mainstream-grade Ampere handles games with slightly less modern architectures.

As we mentioned on the first page, we're using our 2020/2021 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K, locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a flagship Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4 RAM at 3600MHz CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All this is powered by a 1000W Corsair RM1000i PSU.

Death Stranding

We'll start off this page with our favourite strand-type game, Death Stranding. This run-through has Sam running through the curiously tree-less landscape of post-apocalyptic America, with our hapless hero running into boulders and falling down gentle slopes as we hold down the 'W' key. The game does support DLSS - and in fact was the first great demonstration of DLSS 2.0 - but we're using TAA here instead to keep things fair for cards that don't support the proprietary tech. The RTX 3060 manages a 48fps average at 4K, growing to 83fps at 1440p and 113fps at 1080p. For a recent game running at maximum settings, that seems pretty fair.

This is, however, the first game where the RTX 3060 falls behind the RTX 2070, although it's just by a few percentage points; the RX 5700 XT is also able to take advantage of AMD's affinity for this engine with a 15 per cent lead over the 3060. We're still looking at a comfortable 40 per cent boost over the GTX 1070, though, with the 3060 delivering around 90 per cent of the performance of an RTX 3060 Ti while costing 82 per cent of its RRP.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5's reliance on single-core processor performance means that we see a bit of bottlenecking at 1080p and 1440p, minimising the gaps between different graphics hardware. The 3060 hits an unremarkable 49fps at 4K, falling a little behind the RTX 2070 and some distance behind the RTX 3060 Ti, which manages 65fps at the same test. Looking at 1080p is quite interesting, as we can see this is the first Ampere graphics card we've tested that isn't heavily CPU-constrained at this resolution. Basically all the other cards manage an average of around 160fps, but the RTX 3060 is nearly 20 per cent below this figure.

Hitman 2

Hitman 2's benchmark is one of my favourites from our current crop, as it ticks all the boxes for a great benchmark: it's indicative of real gameplay, it's accessible from outside of the game and it allows game settings to be changed easily, without digging through .ini files or searching for arcane launch flags. (If any game developers are reading this article, if you include something like this in your game it's almost guaranteed coverage - just so long as the game and its graphics are interesting, anyway!)

This benchmark is notoriously CPU-limited at 1080p, just like Far Cry 5, but once again we can see that the RTX 3060 is just slow enough to be a limiting factor - it hits 126fps on average, compared to nearer 150fps on pretty much any current GPU from the RTX 3070 or RX 6800 upwards. Again, we're looking at about 90 per cent of the Full HD performance of the RTX 3060 Ti, while costing 83 per cent of the price, so the 3060 looks like it ticks the 'best value' box pretty successfully.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's rendition of Athens is the scene of our final benchmark on this page, where the DX11 open world title proves a stern test to CPU and GPU alike. The RTX 3060 manages only 34fps at 4K, although it is worth noting that the Ultra High settings we're using here could doubtlessly be lowered to achieve a smoother experience, even at this resolution. We're just 1fps behind the RTX 2070, on average, and 4fps behind the RX 5700 XT, the closest AMD GPU in this price bracket. Here, we're actually getting 80 per cent of the performance of an RTX 3060 Ti, making the more powerful card the better value for 4K gaming. At lower resolutions, the performance delta increases and the 3060 marginally retains its value crown.

*If you're comparing performance here with your own system, be aware that the integrated benchmark we use in Odyssey includes variable weather for some reason, so clouds on the horizon can tank performance, necessitating a rerun. We also see a decent amount of variance in lowest one per cent scores from run to run, especially at 1080p, so it's best to look at the averages here and not read too much into the other metrics.

Next, let's look at our final set of rasterised game benchmarks - including a classic 'banana skin' title from the archives.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Analysis

• Introduction and Hardware
• Doom Eternal, Control, Borderlands 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Game Benchmarks Part 1
• Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Game Benchmarks Part 2 [This Page]
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• RTX Game Benchmarks - Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5
• Resizeable BAR Testing - Watch Dogs Legion, Battlefield 5, Metro Exodus
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 - the Digital Foundry verdict