NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs Intel Arc A770 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

Intel Arc A770

The Intel Arc A770 is a mid-range desktop GPU and is manufactured using the 6 nm process at TSMC. The graphics processor has 4,096 shader units and 8 or 16 GB GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit interface (16 Gbps, 512 GB/s).

Features

As the top model based on the Alchemist architecture, Intel offers the Arc A770, the top model in the series. As a completely new development, Intel wants to put pressure on AMD and Nvidia with these graphics cards. Features such as ray tracing are supported and the Intel Arc A770 comes with 32 RT cores. Intel is also implementing 512 Tensor Cores, which we can already find in the current graphics cards from Nvidia. With support for AV1, the graphics card is particularly interesting for content creators. Only the Ada Lovelace models from Nvidia and the RDNA3 GPUs from AMD are currently capable of hardware-side encoding and decoding with the new codec.

Performance

The performance of the Intel Arc A770 is comparable with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or an AMD Radeon RX 7600 comparable. The Intel model copes much better with newer games. With ray tracing enabled, the Intel Arc A770 can even outperform its two competitors. Based on the performance shown, the Intel Arc A770 is ideally suited for 1080p gaming in 2023.

Power consumption

The manufacturer specifies the power consumption of the Intel Arc A770 at 225 watts (TGP). This is slightly more than a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or the AMD Radeon RX 7600.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a fast desktop graphics card based on the Ampere architecture. It uses the big GA104 chip and offers 4,864 cores and 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. 

The performance in games and 4k resolution is slightly above a desktop RTX 2080 Super. For many games, the performance is sufficient for 4k and maximum details. Enabling raytracing however (without DLSS) will lead to a significant lower performance (although the RTX performance was clearly improved compared to the RTX 2000 series).

The GA104 chip is produced in 8nm at Samsung and the power consumption of the RTX 3060 Ti is specified with 200 Watt (RTX 2070 Super - 215 Watt).