NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Review

3DMark Tests Galore!

3DMark Time Spy has been our primary DirectX 12 benchmark test for gaming PCs running Windows 10 for years. This DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 benchmark utilizes a pure DirectX 12 game engine that supports features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading! The developers opted to use DirectX 12 Feature Level 11_0 to ensure wide compatibility with DirectX 11 hardware through DirectX 12 drivers.

We ran 3DMark Time Spy with the standard settings and got the following results:

3DMark Time Spy shows the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ahead of the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER and just behind the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 with an overall score of 12,330 points.

3DMark Port Royal entered the market in 2019 as the worlds first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers. We’ve never included this benchmark before, but now that NVIDIA has more than one generation of cards on the market that have hardware support for real-time ray tracing performance, it was time to include it in our testing. We ran the default test without the demo.

The 3060 Ti Founders Edition turned in a score of 7,038 points in 3DMark Port Royal and that is 1.8% faster than GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER and 8.2% slower than the Radeon RX 6800!

The Variable-Rate Shading (VRS) Benchmark feature test in 3DMark got updated at the end of 2019 and now includes a Tier 2. Tier 2 adds more flexibility and control by allowing different shading rates within each draw call. Right now this test will only run on NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs.

On the VRS Feature Test (#2) workload the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was slower than the RTX 2080 SUPER with VRS off, but was found to be faster with VRS on!

Another new benchmark added by UL to 3DMark in 2019 was the NVIDIA DLSS feature test. This new test helps you compare performance and image quality with and without DLSS processing. The test is based on the 3DMark Port Royal ray tracing benchmark that uses Temporal Anti-Aliasing. TAA usage can result in blurring and the loss of fine detail and that can be regained by the NVIDIA RTX technology called DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). DLSS uses deep learning and AI to improve game performance while maintaining visual quality.

On the DLSS feature test the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was found to be faster than the 2080 SUPER with and without the feature turned on. The 3060 Ti was 9% slower than the Radeon RX 6800 without DLSS and 33% faster with DLSS, so you can see how DLSS is a game changer. AMD doesn’t have a solution like DLSS on the market just yet.