Resident Evil Village isn't a very demanding game, especially with the balanced quality preset, so it's no surprise that at 1080p the RTX 3050 is comfortably pushing over 100 fps, averaging 114 fps. This is GTX 1660 Super-like performance and it meant the new budget GeForce was 52% faster than the 6500 XT, or 78% faster if we compare with the PCIe 3.0 configuration. Even at 1440p the 6500 XT hangs in there averaging 64 fps against the RTX 3050's 79 fps, which made the GeForce GPU 23% faster and given the price difference, even at MSPR, that's a decent result for AMD. The 6500 XT turns in one of its better figures in Far Cry 6 and as a result the 3050 was just 14% faster, though the issue for the 6500 XT is PCIe 3.0 and when compared to that configuration the 3050 was 37% faster. Moving to 1440p increases the margin in favor of the 3050, which is now 66% faster than the 6500 XT when using PCI 4.0 and 128% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. We're also looking at slightly better performance than the GTX 1660 Super.

The RTX 3050 does not skimp out on video memory. Even though it is classed as an entry-level graphics card, the RTX 3050 is loaded up with 8GB of super-fast GDDR6 VRAM. This lets you enable high-res textures in games, arguably the most important graphics option, without experiencing judders as new textures are loaded into memory. In a compatible motherboard, the RTX 3050 runs over a PCIe Gen4 interface with eight lanes for high bandwidth. Read more I am a huge fan of DLSS, however, and it does mean that the RTX 3050 isn't just a good 1080p gaming GPU, it's actually capable of running happily on a 1440p display too. Though DLSS isn't in every game and Nvidia's new game-agnostic Nvidia Image Scaling (roughly analogous to FSR) is available to its older GPUs, too. As we often saw, the 1440p data is even more brutal for the 6500 XT. Here the RTX 3050 was 54% faster, or 85% faster when comparing PCIe 3.0 performance. The RTX 3050 also averaged 74 fps, meaning it was more often than not good for over 60 fps at 1440p using respectable quality settings in many titles. Ray Tracing Performance Even at 1440p, the RTX 3050 managed well over 60 fps and this made it 9% faster than the RTX 2060, and 35% faster than the 6500 XT, a great result given the current market. The GA106 GPU Nvidia reportedly has at the heart of the RTX 3050 is a smaller version than that used in the RTX 3060 which makes it roughly the same size as the chip used in the old GTX 1660 Ti. It does though have almost double the number of transistors at its heart and, thanks to the excellent Ampere architecture it comes with over one thousand more shaders inside it.Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply.

An advantage of this however is a 24% drop in power use to just 130 watts, meaning a basic 550-watt power supply will be more than sufficient to power an RTX 3050 gaming system. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. If you are after one of the best budget graphics cards, you are looking in the right place. Even as the cheapest graphics card in the RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3050 offers up NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for AI-enhanced image reconstruction in games, real-time raytracing and more. When compared to the 6500 XT, we're looking at a 37% performance boost, or a massive 74% increase when compared to the PCIe 3.0 result. The Watch Dogs: Legion results are quite good for the 6500 XT when using the medium quality preset. Here the RTX 3050 was good for 88 fps and that only made it 17% faster than the 6500 XT, or 28% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration, which remains a big win.

Theoretical Performance

Testing with Far Cry 6, which doesn't support DLSS, sees the RTX 3050 able to comfortably break the 60 fps barrier with ray tracing fully enabled. It was slower than the much more expensive RX 6600, but whereas it was 28% slower without RT enabled, it was just 14% slower with it enabled. The RTX 3050 had no issue crushing that result with 225 fps on average, making it just 11% slower than the RTX 2060 and 14% faster than the GTX 1660 Super. Unbelievably, it was 92% faster than the 6500 XT, and let's not even bother with the PCIe 3.0 result for that GPU.