NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Review Roundup
Written on December 31, 2020 by Matt BachIntroduction
Over the last three months, NVIDIA has been doing a rolling launch of their new GeForce RTX 30 Series video cards, culminating in the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB which just recently hit the market. While gaming is almost always a major focus during these launches, professional applications like Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and GPU rendering engines are becoming more and more important for NVIDIA's GeForce line of cards.
To see how the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti performs in real-world scenarios, we have reviews looking at a number of content creation applications. While this post includes a summary for each entry, we highly recommend reading the full article for programs you are interested in as we go into much greater detail in the individual reviews.
If you want to see the full specs for the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD Radeon RX Graphics Cards product pages. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:
| VRAM | Cores | Boost Clock | Power | MSRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon 5700X | 8GB | 2,560 | 1.9 GHz | 225W | $399 |
| RTX 3060 Ti | 8GB | 4,864 | 1.67 GHz | 200W | $399 |
| RTX 3070 | 8GB | 5,888 | 1.70 GHz | 220W | $499 |
| Radeon 6800 | 16GB | 3,840 | 2.1 GHz | 250W | $579 |
| Radeon 6800 XT | 16GB | 4,608 | 2.25 GHz | 300W | $649 |
| RTX 3080 | 10GB | 8,704 | 1.71 GHz | 320W | $699 |
| RTX 3090 | 24GB | 10,496 | 1.73 GHz | 350W | $1,499 |
While specs rarely line up with real-world performance, the biggest thing to note is that the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti is at the bottom end of the product stack from NVIDIA and has the same exact MSRP as the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. So, from a price-to-performance standpoint, that will be the card to beat for NVIDIA.
Note that the current supply is so poor that you will be lucky to find many of these cards for anywhere near the MSRP. However, we typically use the MSRP as a baseline for price in order to rule out fluctuations due to different brands, sales, and scarcity. The actual cost you will likely need to pay for either an AMD or NVIDIA card is likely to be quite a bit different, so keep that in mind as you read this article.
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DaVinci Resolve Studio
Read the full article: DaVinci Resolve Studio - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Summary: Overall, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a very solid GPU for DaVinci Resolve. At most, the RTX 3060 Ti trails the RTX 3070 by just 8%, but can be as much as 2x faster than the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. This also makes the RTX 3060 Ti faster than any AMD GPU we have tested to date, besting even the Radeon 6800 XT which costs significantly more. This makes it a terrific option for those on a tighter budget.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Read the full article: Adobe Premiere Pro - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Summary: Overall, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a very solid card for Premiere Pro and in some cases can be up to 41% faster than the AMD Radeon 5700 XT. That puts it about on par with the significantly more expensive AMD Radeon 6800, and only a small 5% slower than the NVIDIA RTX 3070. This makes it an excellent option for Premiere Pro users that are operating on a limited budget.
Adobe After Effects
Read the full article: Adobe After Effects - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Summary: For most users, After Effects is going to be CPU bottlenecked long before the performance of your GPU comes into play. But in situations where the GPU is being heavily used, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB can be around 8% faster than the Radeon 5700 XT 8GB in After Effects. It is also only slightly slower than the more expensive RTX 3070 8GB, making it a great way to save a bit of money so you can invest more into your CPU or RAM.
Adobe Photoshop
Read the full article: Adobe Photoshop - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Summary: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB consistently ended up at the bottom of our charts - although since it ties with the Radeon 5700 XT as the least expensive GPU we tested, this is largely to be expected. Even then, however, it is very important to note that all the cards we tested performed within the margin of error for our Photoshop benchmark. So, while the RTX 3060 Ti is most likely not quite as good as a more expensive GPU, the difference isn't definitive and is going to be impossible to notice in your everyday work.
GPU Rendering (Octane, Redshift, V-Ray)
Read the full article: GPU Rendering - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Performance
Summary: The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti offers solid performance in GPU rendering, coming very close to the RTX 3070 for $100 less! For an entry-level rendering system, then, the RTX 3060 Ti is a great choice. With the Founders Edition cards that NVIDIA sells directly, two of these cards should be doable in many cases - as long as there is some space between the cards and plenty of airflow from chassis fans. For more than two GPUs, though, blower-style cards are really needed... and it seems unlikely that those will be coming any time soon, if the lack of RTX 3080 and 3070 blower models is any indication. Users who want more than two GPUs, NVLink support, or more than 8GB of video memory for scene data will probably want to look at the RTX 3090 24GB or the upcoming A6000 48GB instead.
How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti perform overall?
In most of our testing, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB does very well - at times matching the more expensive RTX 3070 and at worse only falling behind by ~14% in GPU rendering engines like V-Ray. It is even capable of beating the top-end RTX 2080 Ti from the previous generation in many of the applications we tested! Compared to AMD in the applications that support both CUDA and OpenCL, the RTX 3060 Ti ranges from being just 8% faster than the Radeon 5700 XT to almost 2x faster in applications like DaVinci Resolve.
Combined with the fact that the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has 8GB of VRAM (matching the GeForce RTX 3070 and Radeon 5700 XT), this makes the 3060 Ti a terrific card for the price. In applications where the GPU isn't as critical (Photoshop, After Effects, etc.), it is a great way to get more performance than most users will need, while also gaining access to the latest RTX features. And in the applications that do utilize the GPU heavily (DaVinci Resolve, GPU rendering, etc.), it holds up very well against the RTX 3070, and often far out-paces the current offerings from AMD at that price point.
Due to the terrific performance we saw with the RTX 3060 Ti, we currently are offering it as an option in many of our workstations. If you are in the market for a system, be sure to visit our solutions page to view our recommended workstations for various software packages, our custom configuration page, or contact one of our technology consultants.
Content Creation Workstations
Puget Systems offers a range of poweful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.
Labs Consultation Service
Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.
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Puget, can you please test the RTX 3060 12GB for content creation?
Yep, we pretty much always test all the NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs in our normal suite of content creation applications. Never quite know when we will be able to get our hands on cards (especially these days), but that is usually pretty high priority for us.
Do you have a rough estimate of where the 3060 12gb would fall in this list?
Impossible to tell for sure until we can benchmark one, but NVIDIA is usually decently spread in their performance across their different models. So if I had to guess, I would say probably about as far behind the RTX 3060 Ti as the 3060 Ti is to the 3070.
That is just pure performance, however. If you need the extra VRAM, then the RTX 3060 12GB could easily end up being faster than even the RTX 3080 10GB in some situations. For example, 10GB can not be enough for some workflows in DaVinci Resolve, which can end up giving you "out of memory errors" and prevents you from really doing any work at all. In those cases, it doesn't matter how much faster the RTX 3080 10GB technically is than the RTX 3060 12GB since being able to work at even a slow speed is infinitely faster than not being able to work at all.
Davinci resolve is exactly why I’m wanting to get a new gpu. My gtx 770 4gb just can’t seem to handle even basic editing smoothly. I have a 3820 i7 @ 4.5ghz and 16gb ram. I’ve experienced the out of memory error editing basic timelines of cell phone 4k 30 video. My hope is I can edit 4k 60fps video smoothly with the 3060 12gb. Increased gaming performance is a side benefit, but looking for productivity with this purchase.
Will you review the 3060 (non ti) anytime soon?
We will probably include it in the next rounds of GPU testing we do, but it is unlikely we will do articles specifically for it. It is an interesting card, but simply lower-end than what we typically test and include in our workstations.
Fair enough. Thank you for the honest answer. Looking forward to your next articles.