MSI GeForce RTX 3050 GAMING X 8G Gaming Graphics Card - 8GB GDDR6X, 1845 MHz, PCI Express Gen 4 x 8, 128-bit, 3x DP v 1.4a, HDMI 2.1 (Supports 4K)

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The 6500 XT does crumble at 1440p, whereas the RTX 3050 remains strong, turning in over 60 fps on average to make it 42% faster.

Those margins remained at 1440p. Here the RTX 3050 was 37% faster than the 6500 XT, or 58% faster when using PCIe 3.0. It only managed 41 fps on average, so for this game I'd say the RTX 3050 is better suited for 1080p gameplay. Power Consumption The RTX 3050 was 52% faster than the 6500 XT at 1080p using the second highest quality preset with 141 fps on average. PCIe 3.0 completely crippled the 6500 XT and now the RTX 3050 is seen to be 114% faster, and I should note I got the exact same result using PCIe 3.0 with the RTX 3050. We don't feel the RTX 3050's rasterization performance is powerful enough to justify turning ray traced effects on, but you can, and some of you might want to anyway, so let's take a look. The situation worsens for the 6500 XT at 1440p once again. Now even with PCIe 4.0 we can't even achieve a 40 fps average, meanwhile the RTX 3050 fell just shy of 60 fps and was seen matching the 1660 Super. For those of you wondering why we are comparing with the RX 6600 and not the 6500 XT for the ray tracing benchmark, we simply didn't want to be so cruel. Seriously though, the 6500 XT is so weak with ray tracing enabled that the data isn't useful for comparison. Cost Per FrameTesting with Far Cry 6, which doesn't support DLSS, sees the RTX 3050 able to comfortably break the 60 fps barrier with ray tracing fully enabled. It was slower than the much more expensive RX 6600, but whereas it was 28% slower without RT enabled, it was just 14% slower with it enabled. Even at 1440p, the RTX 3050 managed well over 60 fps and this made it 9% faster than the RTX 2060, and 35% faster than the 6500 XT, a great result given the current market. On Cyberpunk 2077 we find that DLSS is most impressive, boosting rasterization performance by an incredible 48%, allowing the RTX 3050 to beat the Radeon RX 6600. Then using ray tracing without DLSS enabled saw the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 delivering comparable performance at 30-40 fps. But of course, enabling DLSS offered a big boost and then the RTX 3050 was good for around 60 fps on average. The Watch Dogs: Legion results are quite good for the 6500 XT when using the medium quality preset. Here the RTX 3050 was good for 88 fps and that only made it 17% faster than the 6500 XT, or 28% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration, which remains a big win.

The same was true of the RX 6500 XT, with FidelityFX Super Resolution, too. But its severely restricted frame buffer means game performance is still pretty weak even with FSR enabled. It's also not as effective a solution as Nvidia's hardware-based DLSS tech. Moving to 1440p increases the margin in favor of the 3050, which is now 66% faster than the 6500 XT when using PCI 4.0 and 128% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. We're also looking at slightly better performance than the GTX 1660 Super. Next we have Horizon Zero Dawn where the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0 did well relative to most other games with 72 fps on average. The RTX 3050 was 14% faster, though with both using PCIe 3.0 the GeForce GPU would be a massive 55% faster.This makes the RTX 3050 highly adept for esports on a high refresh rate gaming monitor, and cinematic, big-budget games running at a 1080p resolution as well. Ultra-high resolutions such as 4K in AAA games are off the cards for the RTX 3050, but it is more than adequate for 1080p, the most popular resolution for gaming by far. Does the RTX 3050 support DLSS? The RTX 3050 had no such issues though, pumping out a super impressive 130 fps while keeping 1% lows above 100 fps. It was also 13% faster than the RTX 2060 and just 11% slower than the RX 6600. A stellar result there. The game was playable with ray tracing enabled and DLSS, delivering ~60 fps on average. Without DLSS, the frame rate dropped into the low 40s, and that's about the same level of ray tracing performance than you can expect from the RX 6600 in this title. Whereas the 6500 XT dropped performance by 13% with PCIe 3.0, we see no change for the RTX 3050. So gamers limited to a PCIe 3.0 platform (which as of writing is likely a majority), the RTX 3050 is going to be significantly faster. It was also 24% faster than the 6500 XT and dropping the Radeon graphics card down to PCIe 3.0 only extended the margin to 27%, so you could argue that this is a good result for the Radeon.

Moving on to Far Cry 6, we find an average of 96 fps using the GeForce RTX 3050 at 1080p with the medium quality preset. As we've seen multiple times already, it's basically delivering 1660 Super performance, though it wasn't a great deal slower than the 2060 in this one, at least when looking at the average frame rate. Last up we have Cyberpunk 2077, and here the RTX 3050 managed to break the 60 fps barrier with the medium quality preset, averaging 66 fps which all things considered is quite a good result. Unfortunately, it was 18% slower than the RTX 2060, but it was also 40% faster than the 6500 XT, or 69% faster when using PCIe 3.0.With the 6500 XT currently selling for at least 35% over the MSRP, we're expecting the RTX 3050 to come in at a much larger 80% premium, but hopefully it will be less than that. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply.