After numerous rumors and leaks over the past month, the RTX 3050 graphics card has finally been announced by Nvidia. The announcement came during Nvidia’s CES presentation. The RTX 3050 is aimed at budget PC gamers who are looking to upgrade from earlier 50 series cards or other older GTX models.
The RTX 3050 will be the cheapest ray-tracing capable graphics card from Nvidia when it goes on sale later this month. Nvidia didn’t reveal a massive amount of information about the card during the presentation but promised that more details will be available closer to launch. However, they did provide some performance comparisons to the previous 50 series cards. Check out the RTX 3050 performance comparisons below.
When compared to the much older GTX 1050, the gains are massive. The GTX 1050 can’t run many modern games due to its paltry 2GB or 3GB of VRAM, so there wasn’t really much point in it being on the chart. Unfortunately, Nvidia didn’t provide comparisons to the 1650 Super, just the regular 1650. The RTX 3050 performance gains over the GTX 1650 look impressive. However, the GTX 1650 Super also had big gains over its little brother. It will be interesting to see how the RTX 3050 compares to the GTX 1650 Super when benchmarks come out post-launch.
The main benefit of the card, besides raw performance improvements, is the addition of ray-tracing. For the first time, a truly entry-level graphics card from Nvidia will have ray-tracing capabilities. Nvidia is claiming around 75 FPS in Control at 1080p, high settings with ray-tracing on, and DLSS running in quality mode. It is a tad misleading to not give the raw ray-tracing numbers without DLSS. As the software is increasingly being added to games, it is a selling point for buying a graphics card from Nvidia though.
AMD also announced their latest entry-level graphics card today, the RX 6500 XT. Check out how that one compares to the new RTX 3050 here. Although the RTX 3050 is launching for $50 more than AMD’s offering, the RTX 3050 does come with double the VRAM at 8GB.
