MMORPG.com accidentally hit the publish button on its review for EVGA’s GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black today, offering an early glimpse of the budget graphics card’s potential performance ahead of its embargo date, which doesn’t lift until tomorrow morning.
In addition to 3DMark Fire Strike scores, MMORPG’s review includes a handful of gaming benchmarks that show how NVIDIA’s latest GPU fares in modern titles such as Control, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at higher graphical settings in the 1080p and 1440p resolutions. The chief takeaway seems to be that the GeForce RTX 3050’s performance isn’t all that impressive when compared to its closest siblings and Radeon competitors (e.g., the Radeon RX 6600), nor is it a great graphics card for ray tracing.
FireStrike Results
Gaming Benchmarks
“[…] it’s hard to recommend the RTX 3050 itself, especially as even $249 feels too expensive for 1080p gaming in 2022,” MMORPG.com concluded in its review. “And it’s made all the worse when you consider that many sites and stores won’t have stock to meet demand and scalpers will drive up the price, meaning the street price for many users will be far more than the MSRP.”
“Even in a perfect market, it’s hard to recommend the 3050 on its own merits. It’s not a bad card on its own – it does perform well at 1080p. But when you look at the landscape of other cards which are priced with a slightly higher MSRP, it’s hard to justify the 3050. If the choice is a $249 3050 or a $329 3060 with the same Nvidia technology behind it, I’m choosing the latter every time. This is especially true when you factor in the results from tests that showed the 3060’s 1440p performance mirroring the 3050’s 1080p numbers. More performance, better DLSS performance, more memory – it just makes sense.”
The majority of GeForce RTX 3050 reviews are slated to be released tomorrow morning, January 26, at 6 a.m. PST. Advertised with a starting MSRP of $249.99, the budget graphics card features 2560 CUDA Cores, 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, and a boost clock of at least 1.78 GHz. (The EVGA model tested by MMORPG.com features a boost clock of 1845 MHz.)
Source: MMORPG (via VideoCardz)