Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review: Ampere for Only $399

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is affordable and beats the 2080 Super in performance.

Reviews
By Jarred Walton
published
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
Editor's Choice
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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9 Game Average

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Starting with the 1080p combined results, which are the average of the nine individual games, the RTX 3060 Ti looks quite nice. At stock, it's slightly faster than the RTX 2080 Super and a solid 34 percent bump in performance relative to the 2060 Super. It's also just 7 percent slower than the RTX 3070 while costing 20 percent less. Overclocked, it comes pretty darn close to matching the 3070, but then the 3070 can also be overclocked.

We won't bother commenting on the individual gaming results and just let the charts speak for themselves. There are a few games that are clearly running into CPU limits, and some of the games tend to favor AMD more while others lean toward Nvidia. In general, though, there's not a huge difference in standings. For 1080p in particular, this is probably about as high up the GPU ladder as we'd recommend going — unless you're playing a ray tracing game, of course.

Borderlands 3

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Division 2

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Far Cry 5

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Final Fantasy XIV

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Forza Horizon 4

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Metro Exodus

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Red Dead Redemption 2

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Shadow of the Tomb Raider

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Strange Brigade

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FE
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Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    FYI, the initial 3060 Ti review went up on December 1. It was a single monolithic page, for "reasons" related to our CMS and Google. We are now reposting the content in paginated form and redirecting the original article (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-ti-founders-edition-review), which means no comments get carried over unfortunately. The text and charts have not changed, on any of the reviews. It's just a change in the presentation. The comments from the first version of the article can be seen here:

    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-ti-founders-edition-review-ampere-for-only-399.3667330/
    Reply
  • MihaiPop
    Admin said:
    The RTX 3060 Ti is affordable and beats the 2080 Super in performance.

    Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review: Ampere for Only $399 : Read more

    Hi,

    How can I buy this in europe?
    It's everywhere out of stock.
    Reply
  • Andrei2k
    Affordable and relative performance is irrelevant if its unavailable.
    Reply
  • Matt_ogu812
    Andrei2k said:
    Affordable and relative performance is irrelevant if its unavailable.

    Exactly my thoughts just like many other of the 3k series of Nvidia GPU's.
    Reply
  • SyDiko
    Andrei2k said:
    its unavailable.

    You can buy it from eBay for the hefty price of 1 kidney, so in the authors eyes its available.
    Reply
  • Soaptrail
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    FYI, the initial 3060 Ti review went up on December 1. It was a single monolithic page, for "reasons" related to our CMS and Google. We are now reposting the content in paginated form and redirecting the original article (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-ti-founders-edition-review), which means no comments get carried over unfortunately. The text and charts have not changed, on any of the reviews. It's just a change in the presentation. The comments from the first version of the article can be seen here:

    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-ti-founders-edition-review-ampere-for-only-399.3667330/

    Thank you because i was wondering why this new review which seemed like it was not new.
    Reply
  • jeffredo
    To coin an old phrase "vaporware" for all intents and purposes. At least until supply actually allows them to be in stock in numbers enough to bring the price down despite miners.
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    jeffredo said:
    To coin an old phrase "vaporware" for all intents and purposes. At least until supply actually allows them to be in stock in numbers enough to bring the price down despite miners.
    There are lots of cards available if you wish to pay scalper prices for them on ebay, etsy, stockx, gov group, craigslist etc....
    All at 50-100% mark up from retail prices.
    Reply
  • WarNerve
    I just came across this "review" for the 3060 Ti.
    It says, "The 3060 Ti breaks 60 fps at 1080p native, and DLSS can further improve its performance. At 1440p, DLSS Quality mode still manages a decent 67 fps, and the 3060 Ti continues to lead AMD's options."
    I don't know what their talking about. I have a 3060 Ti and at 1080p ,even on High/Ultra settings, I get 144fps on most games. The lowest I've come across so far has been around 80fps. And even without DLSS at 1440p the frames are still around 80-100fps.
    Not to mention that the 3060 Ti is not an AMD card. Maybe that's not what the author meant when he said, "the 3060 Ti continues to lead AMD's options.", but that's what that wording means. It means that the 3060 Ti is AMD's best offering. I'm just nitpicking, I know. But it matters. Especially if you're writing a lot of reviews and such.

    Edit: I know I'm responding to a fairly old post, but the article that lead me here was one of the top recommendations when I searched for info on Google. So I figure, even if a post is old, it's still relevant if people are still being directed to it.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    WarNerve said:
    I just came across this "review" for the 3060 Ti.
    It says, "The 3060 Ti breaks 60 fps at 1080p native, and DLSS can further improve its performance. At 1440p, DLSS Quality mode still manages a decent 67 fps, and the 3060 Ti continues to lead AMD's options."
    I don't know what their talking about. I have a 3060 Ti and at 1080p ,even on High/Ultra settings, I get 144fps on most games. The lowest I've come across so far has been around 80fps. And even without DLSS at 1440p the frames are still around 80-100fps.
    Not to mention that the 3060 Ti is not an AMD card. Maybe that's not what the author meant when he said, "the 3060 Ti continues to lead AMD's options.", but that's what that wording means. It means that the 3060 Ti is AMD's best offering. I'm just nitpicking, I know. But it matters. Especially if you're writing a lot of reviews and such.

    Edit: I know I'm responding to a fairly old post, but the article that lead me here was one of the top recommendations when I searched for info on Google. So I figure, even if a post is old, it's still relevant if people are still being directed to it.
    There are several issues with what you’re saying, mostly to do with reading comprehension. When I say the 3060 Ti “leads AMD’s options,” I obviously mean in the context of this review: the Nvidia 3060 Ti is ahead of AMD’s competing cards.

    That also goes with the FPS metrics. If you play lighter games, you will get higher performance. The “67 fps” refers specifically to a game tested in this review. You quoted one specific sentence that refers to one specific game. That should be enough to give you context:

    “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War uses ray tracing effects for shadows, with a higher fidelity (and more demanding) result in the previous Modern Warfare (2019) reboot. The 3060 Ti breaks 60 fps at 1080p native, and DLSS can further improve its performance. At 1440p, DLSS Quality mode still manages a decent 67 fps, and the 3060 Ti continues to lead AMD's options. The 6800 XT does squeak ahead at 4K, probably thanks to its 16GB of memory, but we doubt many people are going to want to play multiplayer Call of Duty at 30 fps.”

    The data is all there for you to see. If you want to know how the games tested in late 2020 performed on a 3060 Ti, look at the charts. Other games will perform differently. You can look at the current GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy for more recent testing on newer games that didn’t exist when the 3060 Ti came out.
    Reply