MSI GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming X 8 GB Graphics Card Review – Almost RTX 2060 Performance

Keeping their tradition alive of launching a new graphics architecture every two years, NVIDIA introduced its Ampere GPU. The Ampere GPU is built upon the foundation set by Turing. Termed as its biggest generational leap, the NVIDIA Ampere GPUs excel compared to previous generations at everything.

The Ampere lineup offers faster shader performance, faster ray tracing performance, and faster AI performance. Built on a brand new process node and featuring an architecture designed from the ground up, Ampere is a killer product with lots of numbers to talk about. The fundamental of Ampere was to take everything NVIDIA learned with its Turing architecture and not only refine it but to use its DNA to form a product in a completely new performance category.

Today, we will be taking a look at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card which is a major launch considering that it is aimed at the mainstream segment and is also the cheapest Ampere card in terms of MSRP.

Turing wasn't just any graphics core, it was the graphics core that was to become the foundation of future GPUs. The future is realized now with next-generation consoles going deep in talks about ray tracing and AI-assisted super-sampling techniques. NVIDIA had a head start with Turing and its Ampere generation will only do things infinitely times better.

The Ampere GPU does many traditional things that we would expect from a GPU, but at the same time, also breaks the barrier when it comes to untraditional GPU operations. Just to sum up some features:

The technologies mentioned above are some of the main building blocks of the Ampere GPU, but there's more within the graphics core itself which we will talk about in detail so let's get started.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series is made up of a diverse portfolio of graphics cards. Starting today, the lineup starts at the GeForce RTX 3050 with an MSRP of $249 US and goes all the way up to higher-end configurations starting at $499 US for the GeForce RTX 3070, $599 US for the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, $699 US for the GeForce RTX 3080, $1199 US for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and $1499 US for the GeForce RTX 3090. NVIDIA themselves call the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the flagship graphics card and not the GeForce RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 & RTX 3070 are both priced well and in line with their predecessors but the GeForce RTX 3090 goes all out with a price of $1499 US. Even the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has seen a price hike compared to the MSRP of the RTX 2080 Ti ($999 US vs $1199 US). NVIDIA calls the GeForce RTX 3090 the "BFGPU" and as per the terminology, it seems like this is a new marketing name for the Titan graphics card. It is likely that we could see a Titan-based card under the Quadro branding with faster specs out of the box but the GeForce RTX 3090 is purely a gaming graphics card first with all the horsepower for intense professional and workstation workloads.

With that said, the GeForce RTX 3080 replaces the RTX 2080 SUPER at the same price point and the GeForce RTX 3070 replaces the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER at the same price point. Given this trend, we might see the more mainstream variants cost just as much as their RTX 20 SUPER series cards but with a higher performance out of the box.

In addition to the specs/price update, NVIDIA's RTX technologies are being widely adopted by major game engines and APIs such as Microsoft's DirectX (DXR), Vulkan, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite. While there were only three RTX titles around the launch of the RTX 20 series cards, NVIDIA now has at least 28 titles that utilize their RTX feature set to offer real-time ray tracing with more coming soon.

In addition to that, with the upcoming consoles confirmed to feature ray tracing, developers can also make use of the RTX technology to fine-tune future games for the GeForce RTX hardware. Currently, NVIDIA has 13 game engines that are leveraging their RTX technologies for use in their upcoming and existing games while both Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs are part of the RTX ecosystem on the PC platform.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at MSI's latest GeForce RTX 30 Gaming X series graphics card which includes the GeForce RTX 3050 Gaming X 8 GB.

Just like the GeForce RTX 3060, the GeForce RTX 3050 will also be featuring the GA106 GPU but a cut-down configuration. The card will feature 20 SM units and 2560 CUDA cores with a TGP of 130 Watts. The graphics card will feature a base clock of 1550 MHz and a boost clock of 1780 MHz but do expect custom models to feature higher factory overclocks. At its stock speeds, the card will be able to output 9.11 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower. That's more than 2x the TFLOPs compared to the GTX 1650 SUPER.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is built with the powerful graphics performance of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture. It offers dedicated 2nd gen RT Cores and 3rd gen Tensor Cores, new streaming multiprocessors, and high-speed G6 memory to tackle the latest games. Step up to GeForce RTX.

via NVIDIA

The entry-level graphics card will also rock 8 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps and will be running across a 128-bit wide bus interface for a total of 224 GB/s bandwidth. Already, the card is looking like a much better deal for just $50 US over the Radeon RX 6500 XT which has an MSRP of $199 US but packs a 4 GB memory. The card will rock a single 8-pin connector to boot.

As for its feature set, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card rocks all the modern NV feature set such as the latest NVENC Encoder and NVCDEC Decoder, support for the latest APIs, 2nd Generation ray-tracing cores, 3rd Gen Tensor cores. Considering that this is an entry-level solution aimed at eSports gamers heavily, it packs all the modern features such as DLSS, Reflex, Broadcast, Resizable-BAR, Freestyle, Ansel, Highlights, Shadowplay, and G-SYNC support too.

In terms of performance, the GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card will offer over 60 FPS at 1080p in several AAA titles and further extend the performance rating through the use of 2nd Gen RT and new Tensor cores, marking a big leap over the GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card.

Surely DLSS and RT cores will prove to be a major uplift in titles that support them so we can expect the card to easily be faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER though the numbers provided by NVIDIA so far don't showcase that exactly. So we have to wait for independent reviews that are expected to go live one day early prior to launch day.

Something that's easy to overlook within these benchmarks is the fact that only one game in the bar chart above has numbers for the older generation cards while the other two games are tested with RTX On, a feature that isn't available on the former options.

As for price, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card is said to feature an MSRP of $249 US which looks very attractive over the $199 US of the Radeon RX 6500 XT 4 GB if you take into account all the extra features available on the GeForce RTX 30 series cards. With that said, you have to keep in mind that the current market situation won't allow the card to ever hit MSRP prices so we are realistically expecting the 3050 8 GB to land in around $350-$450 US. That's $50 US more than the retail prices for the RX 6500 XT which is in line with the MSRP difference of both cards.

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture deep dive and GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition review, head over to this link.

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