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Despite all the differences under the hood, it would be difficult to tell the difference between the RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 Founder’s Edition cards. They both feature NVIDIA’s revamped PCB layout, which places most of the card towards the front ports. Two large fans keep things cool, and the rear fan blows air straight through the card to the top of the case. It’s a unique approach, one that has worked well for NVIDIA so far. The 3060 Ti was generally idle around 41 degrees Celsius and reached 74 ° C under heavy loads, with maximum fan noise that is much quieter than the RTX 2060 Super. In terms of ports, the 3060 Ti features three DisplayPort 1.4a connections and a single HDMI 2.1 jack, which supports 4K displays beyond 60Hz and 8K.
1,440p benchmarks
All games tested at 1440p with the highest graphics quality setting and ray tracing (where available), on a PC with Intel Core i7-8700K technology and 32GB of RAM.
After spending much of this fall testing powerful new GPUs (be sure to check out our reviews of AMD’s Radeon 6800 and 6800 XT), I knew what to expect with the 3060 Ti. It’s just going to be a cheaper version of the 3070, right? But what really surprised me was how much performance NVIDIA could deliver for $ 399. As I mentioned before, the 3060 Ti easily outperformed the RTX 2080 Super in all of our benchmarks, proving just how much improved the 2060 Super is. But I was also pleased to see that it wasn’t much slower than the 3070 either.
Devindra Hardawar / Engadget
In 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the 3060 Ti came in just 600 points below the 3070, while the gap between the 3070 and the 3080 was roughly 1,300 points. When it came to 1440p games, the cheaper cards were closer. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark hit 88fps on the 3060 Ti at max graphics settings and ultra RTX shadows. Meanwhile, on the 3070 I saw 107 fps. That’s a huge difference in raw frames, but it’s not something you’ll easily notice while gaming, even with a 120Hz or 144Hz monitor. Similarly, the 3060 Ti reached 85 to 110 fps in Destiny 2 with the highest graphics settings at 1440p, while the 3070 typically clocked 100-120fps.
I could get Cyberpunk 2077 running on the 3060 Ti around 65fps at 1440p with DLSS and midrange ray tracing settings enabled. Disabling DLSS, which renders games at low resolutions and uses AI supersampling to approximate the high-resolution look, brought the game to a slow 40fps. Pushing the 3060 Ti a little harder, I hit 55 fps in the native 3,440 by 1,440 resolution of my ultrawide monitor with DLSS. However, to achieve that, I had to switch DLSS to its highest performance setting, which sometimes made the game appear as though it was rendering below 1080p. As you can imagine, it couldn’t be played for too long, even if things were running smoothly.
4K benchmarks
All games tested in 4K at the highest graphics quality settings and ray tracing (where available), on a platform with Intel Core i7-8700K technology and 32GB of RAM.
The limits of the 3060 Ti are most apparent when you start to emphasize it with 4K games. Destiny 2 it hovered between 45 and 60 fps at the highest graphics settings, while the 3070 was more stable between 70 and 80 fps. Add ray tracing to 4K and the 3060 Ti starts to crumble even more. Shadow of the Tomb Raider crawled at 32fps with ultra-ray tracking shadows. However, I guess it’s not that bad, as the 3070 could only muster 37fps at those same settings. (For what it’s worth, the 3080 struggled to hit 55-65 fps too.)
Clearly, the 3060 Ti isn’t the card you’d like to send native 4K games to your TV. But at $ 399, that seems like a decent trade-off for anyone who primarily plays on a 1080p or 1440p monitor. And of course it’s only $ 399 in an ideal world too. Right now, the 3060 Ti is out of stock at all major retailers. And even when available, many cards from NVIDIA partners will cost $ 450 and up. It’s always been difficult to get your hands on the latest GPUs, but that problem looks even worse this year as the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed production considerably.
