Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 review

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 arrives at the perfect time – maybe even a little late – as the best graphics cards keep getting more and more expensive. And because GPUs keep selling out even the few that are reasonably priced haven’t exactly been worth the price tag.

However, with the RTX 3050, you’re not getting much lower performance than the next up Nvidia’s lineup, the RTX 3060. The RTX 3050 has no problem hitting 60 fps in any 1080p game you throw at it, though it might start to struggle in the most demanding games of the generation – think Cyberpunk 2077.

While that all sounds good, it’s hard to ignore how much prices have changed generation-on-generation. While a price tag of AED 1,129 might not seem high when you’re used to seeing graphics cards at AED 3,000 or more these days, it’s still significantly more expensive than xx50 cards of the past. For instance, the GTX 1050 Ti launched at $139, and the GTX 1650 launched at just $149.

So, likely due to an ongoing silicon shortage that’s seeing computing prices rise dramatically across the industry, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is nearly double the price of its last-generation sibling.

That drastic price increase does come with a huge increase in performance. However, people that were hoping to see a graphics card at actual budget prices will have to keep waiting – or turn to the used market. We just hope the RTX 4000 series has something more budget-friendly, assuming the shortage lets up any time soon.

Price and availability

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is available now, starting at AED 1,129 with prices going up from there for more advanced third-party boards. We’re not sure what the aftermarket situation will look like once the boards become available, but if it’s anything like the RTX 3060, there may not be many graphics cards available at that starting price – instead prices might start to climb.

For instance, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3050 Eagle OC 8G we’re reviewing here is a pretty basic version of the graphics card. If you want something with fancy RGB lighting and overclocking-friendly cooling setups, you’re going to have to spend quite a bit more.

Nvidia isn’t making a Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 3050 – just like it didn’t with the RTX 3060 – which is the major reason that graphics cards at the low end of the pricing scale for this GPU will be incredibly rare. Hopefully, as the RTX 3050 isn’t going to be very good for crypto mining, it won’t see massive price increases after release. Only time will tell with that one.

Features and chipset

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, just like the rest of the RTX 3000 series, is built on Nvidia’s Ampere core. In previous launches in this lineup, the improvements Nvidia made to this core over the last-gen Turing core offered a huge gen-on-gen increase in performance – both for ray tracing and regular rasterization.

And the GeForce RTX 3050 is no different. Because of the smaller manufacturing process of Nvidia Ampere, Team Green was able to fit more Streaming Multiprocessors without increasing the size of the die, up to 20 from 14 on the GTX 1650. Nvidia was able to effectively double FP32 cores on each SM, giving the RTX 3050 2,560 CUDA cores, up from 892 on the GTX 1650. This means it’s way more powerful – at least on paper.

With this increase in SMs, there’s of course an increase in power required to drive the RTX 3050 – but not as much as we thought. TGP has only increased to 130W over the 75W TGP of the GTX 1650. That does mean that the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT consumes way less power, but as we’ll see later, it results in a major loss in performance.

This is also the first xx50 card that’s got Nvidia’s full RTX feature set. This means this GPU gets both RT cores and Tensor cores, so it’s capable of ray tracing and DLSS. Both the GTX 1650 and the GTX 1650 Super got excluded from these features in the last generation, so it’s nice to see them make their way to a ‘budget’ graphics card – especially DLSS. Newer games that support these features are going to get a decent boost in performance and quality, so it’s a good feature to see even on the low-end RTX GPUs.

Luckily, Nvidia also upped the VRAM on the RTX 3050 to 8GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus with 224 GB/s of bandwidth. It’s not the fastest memory of this generation, but it should keep this graphics card fighting at 1080p for quite a while.

Because while it’s cool that an affordable graphics card has ray tracing, that’s not the main draw here. DLSS is going to be far more valuable for folks buying this graphics card, as it will boost performance significantly without impacting visual quality much. It’s not free performance per se – and you will notice a quality drop on Performance Mode, for instance – but it does stretch what the RTX 3050 will be capable of at 1080p.

You also get access to other Nvidia RTX tech, as well. Nvidia Reflex is going to be a big deal for this graphics card in particular, as the performance level it offers is already perfect for esports. Nvidia Reflex will enhance the esports experience further by cutting down on input lag. This feature is starting to appear in other games too – it was announced for God of War at CES 2022, for instance – and while it may be nice for a single-player title, it’s especially nice for multiplayer games like Fortnite or Counter-Strike.

Design

We got the GeForce RTX 3050 Eagle OC 8G for our review, and it’s pretty plain as far as graphics cards go. It has a simple dark gray and black colorway, with two fans and a nameplate on the side featuring the Gigabyte and GeForce RTX logos.

There’s nothing in the way of RGB lighting or much visual flair, which will make it a good fit for folks that want a low-profile build.

It’s also a very small graphics card, and combined with the small 130W TGP, this graphics card will have no problem fitting in a small form-factor build.

The two large fans on the front are able to keep the card relatively cool, even during testing. We didn’t see temperatures rise above 63C in our mATX build, which is a good sign. This means there should be enough room to overclock it a bit for extra performance – though we didn’t test that for this review.