Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 review: the Digital Foundry verdict

The RTX 3050 ultimately accomplishes what it set out to do - bring the cost of entry for DLSS and RTX down further than it's ever been before - but falls a bit short of being a great value card as the RTX 3060 Ti, 3070 and 3080 were on their launch. Of course, incredible demand has meant these cards have become incredibly expensive anyway, fading all semblance of value, so if the 3050 was produced in great numbers and available for its RRP that would be a victory in and of itself.

We teed up a comparison against the RTX 2060 earlier, but the 3050 doesn't quite deliver on that front. The older card remains the better performer overall, winning in every game we tested and only tying in Battlefield 5 RTX, and should probably be your first choice if you don't need HDMI 2.1 connectivity and both cards are available at a similar price. However, the RTX 3050 does represent a reasonable upgrade over the $229 GTX 1660 Super, offering around 10 percent better rasterised performance and RT/DLSS capabilities that the GTX card doesn't possess.

Against Team Red, the $249 3050 is in an odd place. It comprehensively beats the $199 RX 6500 XT in most games, with only a few titles showing a value lead for the much-maligned AMD GPU, and performs significantly better at 1440p. In terms of RT performance, the 3050 is a god compared to the 6500 XT, often delivering 2.5 times the frame-rate at 1440p. It also possesses hardware encoding and decoding capabilities left out of the 6500 XT, and works well even on PCIe 3.0 systems - like our test rig. However, that's more a commentary on the relative weakness of the 6500 XT than it is on the strength of the 3050, and our PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0 results suggest that the 6500 XT isn't a great buy even on PCIe 4.0 systems.

The 3050 is also much cheaper than the $329 RX 6600, but also performs well below it in rasterised games. It does draw level in RT titles even without DLSS, so depending on your purposes it might be the better value option there.

So overall then - if you can get it at a reasonable price, the RTX 3050 gets a cautious nod from us. It delivers good-enough performance at 1080p and 1440p, has a complete feature set and avoids any major disaster - not bad.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 analysis

• Introduction and hardware analysis
• 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
• Metro Exodus, Dirt Rally 2, Assassin's Creed Unity - Game Benchmarks Part 3
• Control, Metro Exodus, Battlefield 5 - RT game benchmarks
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 - the Digital Foundry verdict [This Page]