 These days, entry-level GPUs launch for nearly the price of consoles. Partly because cheaper consoles are available, but also because GPUs are more expensive. Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3050 obviously isn't going to change that, but the hope is that it's going to be good enough. I'll give it to you straight right now while you still have the chance. This card is not bad if you need a GPU today and you don't mind 1080p, and we'll have the link below when they're available. Stick around though, and I'll tell you why if you have a card now, you might not want to be so hasty. Thanks to Crucial for sponsoring this video. Step up your game with Crucial's P5 Plus NVMe SSD. It can be installed on the PC, and you can even easily upgrade your new PlayStation 5 with up to 2TB of additional storage that also comes with a 5-year warranty. Get yours today using the link down below. INTRO The RTX 3050 is not a surprise on paper. You've got RT and Tensor Cores, you've got a little more than 2 thirds the CUDA cores of the RTX 3060, 8 gigs of memory on a 128-bit bus, and you've got the NVENC encoder engine and more than 2 display outputs to boot. Compared to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, AMD's mobile GPU cosplaying as a desktop card, the extra $50 doesn't seem like a big price to pay for all of those benefits. How much would you pay for a dedicated video encoding accelerator if your GPU didn't have one? Or extra display outs? Now, that glowing endorsement for industry standard features aside, we do have to test whether this is truly worth the extra spend. And thankfully, our test bench is still warm from our RX 6500 XT testing. We'll be throwing that GPU in along with some choice selections from both teams to see if more memory and an encoder is all the RTX 3050 brings to the table. In F1 2021 at least, so far so good. Not only does it beat the RX 6500 XT, but it also comes pretty close to matching the GTX 1660 Ti, a GPU that launched for $30 more and lacks ray tracing capabilities. Speaking of, the ray tracing performance ain't bad either, easily pulling double the frames the 6500 XT can drip out, and coming surprisingly close to the RX 6600 in the tier above at the same settings. Forza Horizon 4 brings more good news, even pulling a win over the 1660 Ti, although AMD's contender isn't far off here, suggesting that this title isn't sensitive to memory bandwidth, not at these settings anyway, and AMD really did drop the ball with the RX 6500 XT's 4-lane PCIe connection and 64-bit memory configuration. Far Cry 6 without ray tracing displays similar results, with the RX 6500 XT's performance close, but not quite matching the RTX 3050, while getting absolutely creamed the instant we turn on ray tracing thanks to both the GPU's extra video memory and the difference in optimization of Nvidia's RT cores versus AMD's ray accelerators. Hitman 3 didn't stutter for the RTX 3050 either, and we've once again got the highest result out of other cards in class, including the 1660 Ti, although it's worth pointing out that if you're playing it stealthy, Hitman doesn't need twitchy reaction times. What does is CSGO, and it's here we see it fall behind the pack, with the cheaper, at MSRP, GTX 1660 Super pulling slightly ahead thanks to its wider 192-bit memory bus. Just like you can pull ahead with a desk pad from LTTstore.com. Doesn't that be wider? We've got all sizes, and a new configurator to help you choose, even got RGB. If we include the ray tracing results, the RTX 3050 works out to be roughly 92% faster than the RX 6500 XT. But as we've said, ray tracing isn't something you'll want to enable on this class of GPUs without upscaling algorithms like Nvidia's DLSS, which this card does support. If we look instead at the non-ray trace performance, it works out to be just about 23% lead, which is near lockstep with the difference in price between the two cards. It's almost like they planned it this way, huh? The performance is pretty much spot on with the GTX 1660 Ti, too. And since it was a point of contention with the 6500 XT, here's how the 3050 does on Gen 3. It maintains within about 10% of normal performance on benchmarks that dripped up the 6500 XT most last time around, which isn't too surprising since it's got those extra four lanes of PCI Express bandwidth to work with. Productivity is a little more cut and dry. The RTX 3050's ability to use RT cores for rendering and its inclusion of a media engine easily puts it at double the performance of the 6500 XT and 33% more than the 1660 Ti. While productivity needs vary from person to person, this puts the overall average score at a 66% performance advantage over the 6500 XT, if we exclude ray trace gaming. If you want to make it the fairest possible comparison and exclude Blender, it works out to roughly 30%. I mean, any way you look at it, a win's a win. As with the 6500 XT, first-party Founders Edition style cards don't exist, so thermals will vary from board to board. Our EVGA XC card hit a peak of 74 degrees, which puts it at a little under the RX 6500 XT's peak, though it's a wash on average. The cooler is actually a little underbuilt compared to our same cooler on the RTX 3060 XC, so keep that in mind as we move on to the power graphs. It's here that we see the Radeon 6500 XT is significantly more efficient than Nvidia's new card, although the RTX 3050 impressively draws less power than the GTX 1660 Super, and not by a little bit either. And while you might have a tough time finding it in the core clocks graph, the line and therefore the clock stability is as smooth as any other in the lineup here, which shouldn't be too surprising considering the thermal results. This card seems to have a bit of headroom to play with if you wanted to push the power target, but your mileage will, of course, vary depending on the card. Now, the problem many of you may have is, yeah, that's great and all, but this is supposed to be a 50 series card, and it's priced between the GTX 1660 Super and TI. That's where it gets murky. There are many reasons why graphics cards are getting more expensive these days, and the unfortunate reality is it's possible that AMD really did scrape the barrel on the RX 6500 XT to hit that $200 price point. If so, we've now seen the compromises that have to be made to hit that price point that we once considered affordable, and there really is no going back. That leaves me with conflicting opinions about the RTX 3050. On one hand, it delivers performance-wise and is exactly what we expected. A further cut down Ampere GPU and, for the first time in a 50 series card, we're getting RT and Tensor cores. It's the RTX 2050 that we never got with no major drawbacks, and because it's a down-bend GA106, the same GPU that's in the RTX 3060, these are probably reject chips that have been sitting idle this whole time. It'll add some supply relief, at least until they sell through. On the other hand, it's the RTX 2050 we never got, and they're calling it RTX 3050 with a 60 series price tag. This RTX tax began with the first RTX cards in 2018, and that was well before the current scalpocalypse. I just, I worry that there's no incentive to reverse this trend, even if manufacturing costs were returned to normal. Like say GPU mining ended today. The reality is that both supply constraints, stretching until 2024 by some estimates, and the sheer pent-up demand from gamers and professionals for high-performance GPUs is just going to keep prices high. It's not just one thing. A lot of people will probably try to get an RTX 3050 at MSRP for new builds, and if they do, I think they'll be happy with them. But the key word there is try. Intel can't enter the game soon enough, and neither can AMD's expected desktop RDNA 2 APUs. Get subscribed by the way, because we are totally going to be reviewing both of those things, and both are going to be disruptive in their own ways. In the meantime, maybe it's time to lean on one of PC gaming's greatest strengths, and embrace its unparalleled back catalog. Thanks to MINE for sponsoring this video. 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Thanks for watching guys, this got a little depressing at the end there, so why not check out our video on splitting a GPU between multiple virtual machines? It might just be the answer for gaming couples and families.