Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Gets Few Benefits from GDDR6X, Says Reviewer

News
By Zhiye Liu
published

The GDDR6X variant is less than 3% faster than the GDDR6 model.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X 1-Click OC Plus
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X 1-Click OC Plus (Image credit: KFA)

Despite its age, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is still one of the best graphics cards for modern-day gaming. So there was some excitement when word got out that Nvidia would give the Ampere-based graphics card a GDDR6X makeover. But unfortunately, the memory upgrade may end up disappointing.

Polish news outlet ITHardware has put the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X through its paces against the regular model and the more powerful GeForce RTX 3070. As a quick overview, all three Ampere graphics cards use the same GA104 silicon. The difference is that the GeForce RTX 3070's die comes with 46 enabled SMs for 5,888 CUDA cores, whereas the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti only sports 38 SMs for 4,864 CUDA cores. Of course, it would be foolish to think that a memory upgrade can close a 21% gap in CUDA cores, but it'll be interesting to see how close the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X can get to the GeForce RTX 3070.

Remember that the core specifications for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and its GDDR6X counterpart are identical. So we're looking at the same amount of CUDA cores and equal clock speeds. However, the latter arrives with 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory instead of the regular model's 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. As a result, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X boasts a memory bandwidth of up to 608.3 GBps, a whopping 36% more than the GDDR6 model. It also commands a 225W TDP, 25W more than the vanilla version.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X Benchmarks

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Graphics Card1920 x 10802560 x 14403840 x 2160
Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GamingPro OC181.71185.88192.37
KFA2 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X 1-Click OC Plus160.47163.49168.03
Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition158.47160.72164.86

ITHardware utilized the KFA2 GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X 1-Click OC Plus, Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition, and Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GamingPro OC for the comparison. The only flaw from the review is that the publication didn't secure the two GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with equal clock speeds for a more fair comparison. The Asus GDDR6 model boosts to 1,755 MHz, and the KFA2 GDDR6X sticks to the reference boost clock (1,665 MHz). The boost clock speed difference will impact the results.

According to the average performance numbers, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X outperformed the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti by 4% at 1080p and 2% at 1440p and 4K. In return, the GeForce RTX 3070 beat the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X by a 13% margin at 1080p, 14% at 1440p and 4K.

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti presently starts at $399 and the GDDR6X version has a similar starting price. Even though the performance difference is minuscule, common sense says to grab the GDDR6X variant if available. In other markets where the price varies between the two models, one would need to evaluate if the extra 2% performance uplift is worth the extra money.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • OneMoreUser
    3060 still one of the best???

    It is what, like the ten fastest or something like that so how does it count as "one of the best".

    I feel like such statements reflect the quality of reviews here, clearly they are some of the best.
    Reply
  • pclaughton
    OneMoreUser said:
    3060 still one of the best???

    It is what, like the ten fastest or something like that so how does it count as "one of the best".

    I feel like such statements reflect the quality of reviews here, clearly they are some of the best.
    Best != Fastest. Speed is obviously the biggest ingredient there, but there are plenty of other factors.
    Reply
  • OneMoreUser
    pclaughton said:
    Best != Fastest. Speed is obviously the biggest ingredient there, but there are plenty of other factors.
    Well, yes - however what would that be?
    It is not like it offers the best performance per $ since AMD has that covered*, it doesn't offer anything special with regards to number of monitors, noise level or looks so what then?

    * I'm ignoring RT here, since really RT on anything than something close to a top end card is really to slow to matter.
    Reply
  • The Historical Fidelity
    That’s about what I expected for the gddr6x swap. Nvidia would need to be really bad at designing gpu’s if they purposefully bottlenecked the compute cores with insufficient memory bandwidth. That 3% increase in performance compared to the regular 3060 Ti shows that (in rough terms) the compute cores were not fully saturated by the gddr6 maybe 5-10% of the time (by that I mean the compute cores could only work at like ~95% max performance for 10% of the time as bandwidth needs are not static when the load type is dynamic) , and now that the compute cores have 35% more bandwidth they are fully saturated 100% of the time. Makes you think, could nvidia have truly made the compute cores the rate limiting step by simply using 16 Gbps gddr6 instead of cheaping out on 14 Gbps?
    Btw please don’t look too hard into my napkin math, it’s been a 14 hour day and I’m brain dead lol.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    The results should not come as a surprise. Previously we saw this change with the RTX 3070 to 3070 Ti. Even with a mild CUDA core bump, the resulting performance improvement is less than 10% at best, if I am not mistaken. Given that the RTX 3060 Ti is targeted for a max of 1440p, or, low RT performance, the extra bandwidth is not going to make a huge difference. If the upgrade does not result in an increase in price, then its fine. However, I've seen higher prices for the GDDR6X over the GDDR6 version, which makes the upgrade look silly.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    watzupken said:
    The results should not come as a surprise. Previously we saw this change with the RTX 3070 to 3070 Ti. Even with a mild CUDA core bump, the resulting performance improvement is less than 10% at best, if I am not mistaken. Given that the RTX 3060 Ti is targeted for a max of 1440p, or, low RT performance, the extra bandwidth is not going to make a huge difference. If the upgrade does not result in an increase in price, then its fine. However, I've seen higher prices for the GDDR6X over the GDDR6 version, which makes the upgrade look silly.

    Higher speed ram usually has higher latency and strobe line refreshes. That's why we have CAS numbers on RAM. This is why CAS numbers go up as speed does typically.

    So higher latency + higher bandwidth = wash performance wise.
    Reply
  • salgado18
    That 6.6% higher boost clock of the GDDR6 model nearly invalidates the test, in my opinion.
    Reply
  • russell_john
    Admin said:
    Polish news outlet reviews the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X and compares it to the regular version.

    Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Gets Few Benefits from GDDR6X, Says Reviewer : Read more

    The biggest problem with this test is he didn't mention the difference in memory clock speeds ..... I've never even heard of KFA2 and looking at their website they don't even list the memory speed in their specs .... So if they didn't actually tune the memory speeds then the card isn't going to gain a damned thing going to GDDR6X

    I'll wait to see what one of the more respected manufacturers puts out before I'll judge it ..... I don't really expect much because the 3060 just can't make use of the extra speed
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    russell_john said:
    The biggest problem with this test is he didn't mention the difference in memory clock speeds ..... I've never even heard of KFA2 and looking at their website they don't even list the memory speed in their specs .... So if they didn't actually tune the memory speeds then the card isn't going to gain a damned thing going to GDDR6X

    I'll wait to see what one of the more respected manufacturers puts out before I'll judge it ..... I don't really expect much because the 3060 just can't make use of the extra speed
    KFA2 is a pretty common brand in Europe and Asia, the farther east you go the more widespread they get. Just like Palit, for that matter. Excellent cards, but Americans are apprehensive because they often don't know the name, while in Europe their rep is pretty good, and for good reasons. In fact if I remember correctly, KFA2 is a sub-brand of Palit just like GALAX and Gainward is nowadays. Just because they aren't as well-known in the US does not mean they are bad. Palit is the biggest manufacturer of Nvidia cards in the world.

    Edit:
    Techpowerup gives the memory clock as 1188MHz:
    https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/kfa2-rtx-3060-ti-1-click-oc-plus-gddr6x.b10257
    (Edited for spelling mistakes)
    Reply
  • Friesiansam
    As there is no explanation of what the figures represent, the table, "GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X Benchmarks" means nothing.
    Reply