RTX 3060 vs PS5 and Xbox Series X: How a mid-range PC will stack up in 2021

When a new generation of graphics cards hits the scene, it’s still impressive, but these first tier maps are out of reach for gamers working on a budget. The midrange second round of cards is where the real excitement lies for most of us, and Nvidia has finally revealed its next competitor: the GeForce RTX 3060, a $ 329 card that gives the latest consoles. a run for their money at an affordable price. But is it a more powerful alternative at the same price? We will take a look.

Nvidia CES 2021 – GeForce RTX 3060

Like the GTX 970 and 1060 that came before it, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this as Nvidia’s next smash hit, provided it can maintain the impressive generational leaps that other 3000-series cards have shown to date. ‘now. As Nvidia noted during its launch event, this class of GPU tends to strike that perfect balance between price and performance that makes PC gaming a compelling alternative to affordable consoles.

Nvidia claims that AAA games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs Legion, and Cyberpunk 2077 will all hit over 60 fps with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled. Now it’s just a matter of using ‘high’ settings at 1080p, but keep the target user in mind here: most gamers still use this resolution depending on the Steam Hardware Survey. And I’m willing to bet that anyone looking to upgrade to 1440p will have no problem ensuring good performance, even if ray tracing might be turned off or some settings turned off. Nvidia hasn’t given us a ton of metrics to glean performance without ray tracing, but we’ll take a closer look at these cards once we get our hands on them. If you’ve been waiting to upgrade that old GTX 1060, this could very well be your next card.

Comparing it to consoles is a bit more difficult, of course – all we can do is compare teraflops, which are far from a perfect measure of GPU power. But with Nvidia claiming 13 teraflops of shader on the RTX 3060, we’re looking at a card that is similar or better than what the PS5 and Xbox Series X offer (10.28 teraflops and 12 teraflops on their respective GPUs). I wouldn’t be surprised to see better ray tracing performance on the 3060 as well, especially with the addition of DLSS. Oh, and it has 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which will help you if you plan on running higher resolution textures.

That said, the consoles still have a small edge in terms of optimization and price, and this year’s consoles presented a pretty impressive value proposition. If you wanted to build a PC that could compare to console performance, the RTX 3060 is probably in the top bunch of what you’re looking for in a graphics card. But doing it at the same cost as the new consoles – even the more generous $ 500 price tag of high-end models – will be difficult, if not impossible. A $ 329 card only gives you $ 180 for a motherboard, processor, RAM, storage, power supply, and case. The processor alone will burn much of it, even a Ryzen 3 3100 is $ 100 MSRP, and it’s decidedly less powerful than the 8-core processors in the PS5 and X-series. By scraping the bottom of the barrel for your other components, you would still go over your $ 500 budget with all the parts in tow.

But, as I have said many times, this is not a fair comparison, as most PC gamers already have PCs. So it’s really about comparing the price of a PC upgrade to the price of a full console. And if you’ve got a half-decent desktop, $ 329 to upgrade your graphics card is terribly convincing compared to a $ 400 or $ 500 console, even if you need to add extra RAM or a new power supply. You’ll get similar to better performance, not to mention all the other perks of PC gaming: like free online multiplayer, tons of freebies and sales, mods galore, and an unmatched level of customization.

Of course, this all assumes that you can actually get your hands on one of these cards to get started. The latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD have proven to be even harder to buy than the constantly disappearing PS5 and Xbox Series X, meaning all of this is useless if Newegg is out of stock faster than you can click. the Buy button. Thanks to supply shortages and spikes in demand related to the pandemic – in addition to the already high demand for new cards when they come out – I guess it will be just as difficult, if not more difficult, to acquire an RTX 3060 when it launches in February. (Remember, this section of the product stack is Nvidia’s most popular.)

But if nothing else, it bodes extremely well for the near future of PCs, and gamers looking for that mid-price have something pretty exciting to look forward to (once supply can keep pace with demand). In the meantime, keep an eye on @IGNDeals and we’ll try to let you know when the new cards hit the market, again and again and again.