Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti review: the typical performance upgrade spectrum

Death Stranding, Far Cry 5, Hitman 2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Additional contributions by Richard Leadbetter

Published on 1 Dec 2020

The 3060 Ti testing continues as we grapple with two Ubisoft open world games, Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, plus Death Stranding and Hitman 2. There's an even split between DX11 and DX12 here, with Ubisoft on the older API and the others on the latest version, allowing us to see how this level of Ampere handles games with slightly less modern architectures.

As we mentioned on the first page, we're using our 2020 test rig for these benchmarks. The heart of the system is a Core i9 10900K locked to an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz on a ultra premium Asus Maximus 12 Extreme Z490 motherboard. This is cooled with a Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO and backed with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4 RAM at 3600MHz CL16. To keep our entire test suite installed on a single drive, we're relying on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD. All of this is powered by a 1000W Corsair RM1000i PSU.

Death Stranding

We'll begin with Death Stranding, a strand-type game that debuted on PS4 in 2019 and came to Windows nearly nine months later. This benchmark doesn't contain much action - unless Sam trips over a rock, which does happen on a somewhat regular basis on the uneven terrain here - but still provides a good workout especially with the game's DLSS feature disabled. The 3060 Ti does outperform the 2080 Super once again, this time by around a five per cent margin, while reaching 89 per cent of the frame-rate of the RTX 3070. We're only just 20 per cent faster than the last-gen RX 5700 XT here, a closer margin than we've seen elsewhere. Radeon hardware tends to do well here, but so far we haven't seen any mid-range cards announced from Team Red...

Death Stranding: Max, DX12, TAA

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5's reliance on single-core processor performance means that we see a bit of bottlenecking at 1080p and 1440p, minimising the gaps between different graphics hardware. Let's focus on 4K then, where the 3060 Ti hits a solid 65fps. That's almost identical to the RTX 2080 Super, marking the first time that we haven't really seen the new card outperform its closest last-gen competitor, but we are still 18 points clear of the GTX 1080 Ti. Compared to the RTX 3070, the 3060 Ti is still delivering better value: 89 per cent of the performance at 84 per cent of the price.

Far Cry 5: Ultra, DX11, TAA

Hitman 2

Hitman 2's benchmark is a great example of what we're looking for when it comes to selecting games for our test suite. It's accessible outside of the game, minimising the time spent navigating through menus, with all options selectable before the bench is launched. The actual scene is quite long, but it's predictable - so some automation is possible. If any game developers are reading this, if you include something like this in your game it's almost guaranteed coverage - as long as the game and its graphics are interesting, anyway.

In what feels like a repeat of Far Cry 5, the 3060 Ti and 2080 Super are neck-and-neck, with the 3060 Ti's 0.4fps advantage coming well within the margin of error. Once again, we're operating at 88 per cent of the performance of the RTX 3070, and splitting the two closest AMD cards (the RX 5700 XT and RX 6800) right down the middle. Again, it's party time up against Pascal. This benchmark is notoriously CPU-limited at 1080p and even 1440p resolutions, but at 4K, the 3060 Ti is nigh-on 30 per cent faster than GTX 1080 Ti.

Hitman 2: Ultra, DX12, TAA

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Assassin's Creed Odyssey's rendition of Athens is the scene of our final benchmark on this page, where the DX11 open world title proves challenging for both CPU and GPU alike. This is the first game where the 2080 Super takes an advantage, although it's just three per cent and the overall experience is still pretty indistinguishable. The 3060 Ti is also a little further behind the RTX 3070 here, managing only 83 per cent of the performance rather than the 88 per cent we've seen most commonly so far. This suggests the bench is a little more compute-heavy than its peers, allowing the 3070 and 2080 Super to clean up. This is a game that is rarely kind to new graphics hardware and it's also delivering the smallest leap in performance vs the Pascal-driven GTX 1080 Ti.

*The benchmark annoyingly includes variable weather, with clouds sometimes appearing on the horizon and tanking performance. We also see a decent amount of variance in lowest one per cent scores from run to run, especially at 1080p, so it's best to look at the averages here and not read too much into the other metrics.