The rumours were true: the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a real graphics card, and we’ve been testing it for the past week. Nvidia promises RTX 2080 Super level performance in a smaller, cheaper and more efficient Ampere design, and – spoiler alert – that’s exactly what our testing shows they’ve delivered.
For £370 in the UK, $400 in the US and around €399 in Europe, the 3060 Ti isn’t in mainstream territory, but it’s significantly faster than the RTX 2060 Super it replaces at the same price-point and AMD’s competitive Big Navi architecture has yet to debut at anything below the $580/£530 price point of the RX 6800. If the Green Team is able to actually produce these cards in volume – and sell them to actual customers rather than bot farms – they could be onto a winner.
In terms of the specs and underlying architecture, the RTX 3060 Ti uses the same GA104 GPU as the RTX 3070, but with fewer CUDA cores – 4864 versus 5888. The card also operates at slightly slower clock speeds (1665MHz boost versus 1725MHz) to fit into a 20W lower TDP (200W vs 220W). The memory subsystems are unchanged however, with both cards sporting the same 8GB GDDR6 operating at 448GB/s. It’s good to see 8GB of VRAM becoming the new standard, with all next-gen cards from both teams providing at least that much thus far.
1 of 6 Caption Attribution Looks familiar? RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same silicon as the RTX 3070 and gets the same Founders Edition design – just with a silver sheen.
| RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 2060 Super | RTX 2060 | GTX 1060 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | GA102 | GA104 | GA104 | TU106 | TU106 | GP106 |
| CUDA cores | 8704 | 5888 | 4864 | 2176 | 1920 | 1280 |
| VRAM | 10GB GDDR6X | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 320-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Bandwidth | 760GB/s | 448GB/s | 448GB/s | 448GB/s | 336GB/s | 192GB/s |
| Base Clock | 1440MHz | 1500MHz | 1410MHz | 1470MHz | 1365MHz | 1506MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1710MHz | 1725MHz | 1665MHz | 1650MHz | 1680MHz | 1709MHz |
| TDP | 320W | 220W | 200W | 175W | 160W | 120W |
| Die Size | 628mm2 | 392mm2 | 392mm2 | 445mm2 | 445mm2 | 200mm2 |
| Transistors | 28B | 17.4B | 17.4B | 10.8B | 10.8B | 4.4B |
The comparison against older generation cards is more interesting. The 3060 Ti manages to more than double the number of graphics cores of the 2060 Super, in a smaller die that consumes only a tad more power. Looking further back, at the GTX 1060, and the multiplier is closer to 4x – with a corresponding increase to transistor count, courtesy of the shift from the 16nm with Pascal to 12nm with Turing and now 8nm with Ampere.