Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2021 (part 2).
Best Graphics Cards for Gaming in 2021.
Nvidia's Ampere march continues with what might just be the best of the bunch. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has all the same features as the other 30-series GPUs, with a starting price of just $399. In theory, of course, as it naturally sold out just as quickly as all the other new graphics cards.
The 3060 Ti ends up beating the previous gen 2080 Super in performance, winning every test we ran. It's also only about 9 percent slower than the 3070 but costs 20 percent less. If you're still sitting on a GTX series or similar GPU, like a GTX 1070 or RX Vega 56, the 3060 Ti is up to twice as fast — sometimes even more, in the latest games.
The only real concern is the lack of VRAM. 8GB is enough, for now, but some games are starting to push beyond that threshold. Of course you can drop the texture quality a notch, and you might not even notice the difference, but deep down inside you'll feel regret. (Not really — high settings often look indistinguishable from ultra settings.)
Until AMD releases its next round of RDNA2 cards, which we expect in the first quarter of 2021, there's nothing else that can challenge the 3060 Ti at anything close to the $399 price point. It's 35-45 percent faster than the 2060 Super, and 25-30 percent faster than the RX 5700 XT, all for the same nominal asking price.
The biggest concern right now is just finding one of these cards for sale. Mining performance pretty much matches the 3070 (at least for the non-LHR models) and AMD's latest gen cards, which means prices are often triple the official launch price. Also, 8GB still feels a bit stingy, considering the 1070 had that much memory over four years ago.
The GeForce RTX 3070 continues the Ampere onslaught and the march of next-gen architectures. It's a sizeable step down from the 3080, and has less than half the VRAM of AMD's RX 6800 series cards. However, the 3070 also costs less than AMD's new cards and still has generally superior ray tracing performance, plus DLSS. It's too bad all of the 3070 cards will likely continue to sell out for quite some time. The new RTX 3070 Ti delivers slightly better performance for $100 more, but also bumps the power use up by 30%, so we recommend sticking with the non-Ti card for now.
The 3060 Ti's $400 price point makes the 3070 less endearing. It's about 10-12 percent faster but costs 25 percent more. Of course, if you factor in the rest of your gaming PC, that extra $100 probably isn't too big of a problem. For new gaming PC builds, you shouldn't buy anything right now that costs $300 or more unless it's sporting an Ampere or Big Navi GPU. Especially at current shortage-induced prices. We do have some reservations, however.
While 1440p and 4K gaming are totally possible, 4K at maximum quality often drops below 60 fps. DLSS can fix that, if a game supports it, but ray tracing even with DLSS often means 40-50 fps at 4K. We're also concerned with the 8GB of GDDR6. Not only is that less memory on a narrower bus than the 3080, but it's clocked quite a bit lower. We've already encountered a few games where 8GB starts to be a bit limiting at maximum quality, and that's only going to get worse in the future. AMD's choice to put 16GB on its Navi 21 GPUs makes Nvidia's 8GB look even worse, and Nvidia will have 12GB on the RTX 3060.
If you want a fast Nvidia GPU for the lowest price possible, the 3060 Ti gets the nod. If you can fork over an extra $100, the 3070 is a reasonable upgrade, which then leads to another $100 for the 3070 Ti, and at that point why not just get the 3080? It's the 'best' overall card, after all. That's the problem with looking at higher cost cards, and the law of diminishing returns. For now, if you've always wanted an RTX 2080 Ti but couldn't justify the cost, the price of entry has been (sort of) slashed in half.
Comments
Post a Comment