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How good is the latest Ampere? We find out.
Going to try and get one as a 'tide me over' if the price isn't over rrp (doubtful) and I can beat the scalpers/bots, it's not like I can get anything I need for a full build I want to do lol.
Wish me luck people...yeah yeah I know I'm dreaming but I can live in hope until 30 seconds after launch.
Impressively tiny die, with the cut down cuda cores as well Nvidia ought to be able to churn out lots of these (other component supply allowing).
Performance is not so impressive in my books however. GPCPU shows a glimse of what it should be capable of, but it's not getting there in most games so perhaps they've cut down too many ROPs/TMUs or something.
TPU puts this closer to an RTX2070. At RRP it isn't too bad not brilliant either. However,if it is £400~£450 its very overpriced IMHO,and Amazon had a lowish end Palit RTX3060 for £400 last night!! :(
I wouldn't be shocked to find in the future that this was originally intended for the miners, and maybe content creators, but nvidia found out they could sell them the higher cards at the super inflated prices instead.
According to at least one other review the performance in vray (something I'm familiar with) and other '3d rendering engines' is actually pretty good, it's competing with a 2080-2080ti's.
As an upgrade for 1080p 1xxx series users it's not too shoddy imo.
Hexus - Obviously the cooling is more than required for the card, therefore is the max frequency you are seeing limited by it hitting the power target?
How does it do if you raise the power target or drop the voltage?
Seeing as the boost behaviour renders traditional overclocking practically useless these days it would be good to see a shift in methodology to match.
I find it weird no reviews seem to be running CB2077 on this GPU?? Can Hexus include it in future reviews please??
The AutoOC tool they use in Afterburner kinda does all that. You raise the power target to the highest supported by the VBIOS, and it tests how high the core can clock (while remaining stable) at a range of voltages. You might be able to gain a few percent with careful handtuning in Afterburner but I wouldn't count on it.
Better cooling isn't going to move the needle on this class of card; with the most generous VBIOS pushed all the way out it's a ~200w card.
Glad I got the rtx 2060 super on black friday 2019 for £340 including a game, since this 3060 isn't much of an upgrade at all tbh. Looks like the rtx 2060 6GB has been mislabelled as an RTX 2060 8GB by the way in the benchmarking, just might cause a little confusion that's all. Trying to get hold of a 3060 would probably have been nightmare too if I had decided to wait for it.
Pass. I wanted a 3090.
Actually I wanted to replace my entire rig last year, but that didn't happen and things aren't looking any better (so far) this year.
On the plus side, I managed to get a load of stuff for my retro collection including a brand new 19'' CRT. Every cloud and all that :)
Is it worth grabbing one to upgrade from a Vega 56 for 1440p?
gamersnexus included it in their video.
Well that was an exercise in futility, no way I'm paying the prices they're asking and at least in one case the site seemed to be holding stock back so they could increase the price as they went along (bit shady imo)...
Scan listed £299 then with 5 minutes to go removed it. Their cheapest one was £360 but you could even buy it.
Nvidia have to stop lying about its RRP,which is clearly a load of nonsense,and blatant false advertising.
Edit!!
Also I hope all the reviews actually show true launch pricing and not give AMD/Nvidia free marketing with their false RRPs.
3060ti is probably more suitable for 1440p. If you're considering upgrading, the Vega cards are notably good for mining so the going price for a V56 on ebay right now is £450-500. It's a terrible time to buy a new card but it's a remarkably good time to sell older ones, too.
While I agree that CP2077 would be a great addition to the benchmarks (both for it's Ray Tracing as well as non-RT aspects), is the game actually mature enough to not have to re-benchmark all the cards if there are some tweaks later down the line? Control certainly helps to cover this aspect quite nicely and can be quite brutal I found on my older 2080 without DLSS at 2K resolution. Anyway, if the card can't cope with Psycho settings in CP2077 it's probably not worth trying is it? :vacant:
Anyway, all the new cards seem to be a little bit of a moot point in terms of bothering to benchmark them when you can't buy one from an actual retailer (so it seems).
It is stable enough for performance testing IMHO - I can literally point out areas on the map,and what time of the day test runs can be done easily. For example some of the underpasses have a lot of lighting and reflections going on,and not too much in the way of NPCs either.
GPGPU Mining will keep most of Nvidias cards super expensive though, in that field I see a gain in advance for better availability for consumers on AMD though or something down those lines.
As a 1060 6GB user for 4 and a half years, this card is not good enough for the price it is listed at - barely double the performance of a card that's nearly half a decade old is pretty poor, especially when the price point is much higher. It's a card I'd only aim for if I had a failure, or managed to get one well below £300, which is about as likely as winning the Lotto jackpot right now. The 3060ti makes so much more sense, and would be the minimum I'd want after waiting for so long.... There shouldn't be such a performance difference between a 3060 and 3060ti, this is obviously something that should have been called a 3050ti, and priced much lower. The practically useless 12GB on a card of this class probably doesn't help with pricing....
Nvidia is pulling the same trick(like AMD) with its partners. Its quite clear to support their industry leading profit margins,the RRP is too low for AIB partners to survive on. So they set pie in the sky RRPs,then can blame partners,miners,etc for the RRP not being kept to. They did the same with Fermi IIRC(maybe even GT200 if memory serves me correct),when XFX basically flipped to ATI because many partners found it hard to make money on lowish prices and limited GPU allocation.
Well £300 for something with 1080ti raster performance (from other benchmarks I've seen) and 2070 ray tracing performance isn't bad, this has been aimed heavily at 1060 owners (that was £260ish at launch) and would be a good solid option . . . if you could get it for the £300 price
As the market currently stands I've lost all interest in new hardware until things calm down.
Good review. Reading this line does hurt a bit inside "it's for those who come from older hardware and want to play the newest games" - if only this was possible!
This. I'm in the US Midwest and have a MicroCenter 10 mins away, who were only selling them in store (no online sales).
They had 50+ cards in stock when I looked about an hour after launch (midday Central Time) and all the cards had sold by 6pm. And it really doesn't help that people are buying them at the inflated prices.
Nvidia's RRP is $329 but the cheapest card was £389.99 (11 stock) and other models were at least $450, one being $510. There's no way I'm buying a 3060 for $10 more than the 3070 and even $60 over RRP is too much (18.5%).
Nvidia really have a lot to answer for right now with regards to the $329 price they quoted when nothing was remotely close to that price.
Apparently the suggested retail price is USD 329. In Danish Kroner that's about 2000 DKK. Well, I had a quick glance at one of our major retailers here in Denmark (Proshop) and the price range is between 3700 and 4800 DKK (USD 600 - 785). And of course not even one of the 10 listed models is in stock or even has any kind of date attached to it. Colour me surprised...
this is all highlighting one of the major problems, supply chain and how little information we (consumers) have on all the steps.
AFAIK nvidia own no manufacturing, the fe cards are made by an oem for them, how much does it cost them to have them made? What are the supply chain steps to get to us?
the rtx 3060 is even worse because there are no direct nvidia cards, we have no idea how much influence nvidia has in that supply chain.
We don't know how many hands the product passes through and at what point the price rises are happening.
I will hold nvidia to account for having better knowledge of the supply chain than we do and should of had a better grasp as to the final rrp, I'm thinking they just ran the numbers through the historic supply chain numbers to get the rrp and ignored the current situation.
Did they do it wilfully to make lower prices for marketing? or was it a simple mistake that no one actively double checked because the numbers were so good?
this is unfortunately all too common in corporate culture, no one wants to double check good numbers (even internal numbers) because it'll make your department and you look bad.
Is this a criminal action . . . that's a tough one, we don't know the full information on the state of the supply chain, we have hints about the component shortages and price rises affecting manufacturing but we have no details.
the difference between rrp and actual price could be, nvidia honestly believing their rrp and messing up or messing up the rrp and wilfully not double checking or flat out giving misleadingly false rrp or some other part of the supply chain sabotaging it with price gouging esp at a distribution level.
it could well of been miners buying at the distribution level pushing the wholesale price up and the nvidia rrp was based on the false notion that their actions would of curtailed it.
But that's just my speculation, it might be wrong, nvidia might of just increased the unit cost on the gpu's to boost profit margin and lied through their teeth about the rrp
that too is just speculation as we just don't have any hard info on the supply chain details speculation is all we have.
That and welcome to the free market, this is what happens when prices are driven by supply and demand.
I think Nvidia is doing what they did during the Fermi days and knows exactly what the numbers are,but are forcing their AIB partners to RRPs they can't keep to,whilst asking top dollar for the parts they supply. Remember what happened back then - instead of Nvidia getting the poor PR,it was the AIB partners who got blamed,when prices for many models were not as good as expected. A number such as XFX suffered a lot,because they couldn't make enough money and didn't get enough supply. Yet the same reasons were wheeled out,ie,GPU shortages,bad nodes,etc.
Despite this Nvidia didn't take the hit for most of it - TSMC,AIB partners,etc all did.
Nvidia knows if they set a realworld RRP,they would look bad. Its all PR numbers to give hope to people(and reviewers) that you "might" get a GPU at RRP. This is just another way for Nvidia to hide stealth price increases,by pointing fingers at their partners instead,and is the same tactic AMD has used recently with the RX6800 series RRPs. Nvidia did the same nonsense when the Titan GPUs were released at nearly £1000. Conveniently some Nvidia slide got leaked showing 28NM costed more,etc so people said poor Nvidia they needed to charge more. So despite all these added costs,see how the results don't really reflect it(basically more record revenue and margins). Nvidia like Apple is very adept at pushing down its supply chain prices as much as possible,and it wouldn't surprise me one bit Samsung offers them a much better deal than TSMC offers AMD. They have been around for decades and JHH is one savvy businessman.
Same old tactic,get you to feel "sorry" for multi-billion dollar companies.
Get gamers used to paying more,and next generation the RTX4060 will be a £400 GPU at RRP,because they wouldn't blame Nvidia for essentially making sure the RTX3060 sells at that price. Now GPUs which used to sell for £150~£250,now sell for essentially £350~£450.
Expect the next few quarters of Nvidia profits and margins to hit new highs.
Also I beginning to question the real point of selfbuilt gaming PCs - gaming laptops and prebuilt desktops seem much better value. Its quite clear Dell,etc are not paying the same prices we are paying for CPUs and GPUs. Even consoles are increasingly looking a decent alternative for the normal gamer. If better keyboard and mouse support comes out it could make more people switch over IMHO.
oh I have no sympathy for nvidia as far as I can tell the rrp was naive incompetency at best, wilful incompetency at worst.
I just don't think it was deliberate falsehood, that is too risky and because I do believe in Heinlein's razor
or Hanlon's razor if you preferQuote:
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
I think someone took the chip price, ran it through the historical formula to generate the rrp, marketing needs a low rrp number to make good pr so they grab on to it and run, no one questions the number because they need it for the pr before the earnings call.Quote:
never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
no one stops to think about past the earnings call or the actual release price because that's later not now.
And now that we are later not now (if that makes sense) firefight the bad pr, which atm seems to be keep quite, wait for it to go away and bask in your good personal performance review, not your fault the numbers were wrong.
Looking forward to seeing how this one compares in market saturation compared to the 1060, as per the steam survey it was around ~10% of users had the 1060, which is pretty huge. Early looks into it are looking promising for this card for an average user... If the prices normalise a bit...
Aside from the 3090 FE (and maybe the 3080 FE), all of the RRPs for the 3xxx series seem to be way off the mark, especially so for the AIB card pricing. I do have to wonder how much the chips actually cost, plus the circuit board and various components, plus validation. If you look at the RRP for the 3060, adjusted for inflation it's roughly where it should be priced (everyone seems to exclude inflation when factoring in how much OLD cards cost, me included). Those AIB prices though are simply horrendous for any of the 3xxx series cards, I think about the only one I've seen close to the price is the Asus TUF cards, not that there are any available.
AMD and Nvidia know the costs,and are constantly accessing these things. They are just doing more PR nonsense to look like the good guys here. You might for example argue the RTX3080 was priced when the new mining craze only just started,etc but the RTX3060 was only revealed a few weeks ago in the middle of the mining craze. I find it highly unlikely that in the 24 hours prior to launch the world changed so much,that prices suddenly rose for components,for GPUs made and packaged a few weeks ago.
So Nvidia announced RRP right after many of the cards were in the process of being made,or had been made in my estimation. Remember all the crap AMD got with Vega and its fixed limited time launch pricing?? Now you know why they are playing this game now,so AIB partners get the blame. If they didn't people would see the fact its another Turing level price increase.
Pretty much exactly that, making as much money as they can from this is understandable, that's capitalism. What sucks is that their pretending to care for no other reason than they know admitting wanting to make as much money as they can would be bad for public relations.
It's why they released their CMGPU's, without much fanfare last time but more-so this time around, their not trying to help gamers get their hands of their cards their trying to kill the second-hand market where gamers would buy last gen cards used for mining when the miners moved onto their new cards.
Ultimately this will be about raw numbers. if the cost to income ratio adds up using the last 3 month trend in mining rewards and crypt prices, miners will pile in, if not they will stay out. We are yet to see what efficiencies can be eeked out of the 3060 12gb series but expect miners will find a way to boost the hashrates or lower power consumption somewhat to make them viable.
I'm still on a GTX980, developing a game which is very heavily GPU-limited (the graphics are produced by raymarching), and while I'd love to upgrade, this doesn't at all get my juices flowing. I've got a small amount of savings which I planned to use to finally upgrade my machine after about 6 years once I've published the game later this year.
The massive price hike that came in with the 20XX series and looks set to stay has made me reticent to upgrade, and the relatively poor performance for the midrange cards is extremely disappointing. Perhaps if supply wasn't so screwed, competition would make it more appealing, but right now I think I may be staying with my old 980 for another year or more.