Maybe, but when they are turning it on at 1080p - or running at lower quality settings to squeeze out 1440p performance at 60 fps - but other wise you could have had a 1070 or 1660 Super this whole time at very similar prices - it makes me shrug. As the headline enhancement, meh.
It gets parroted other places like Ars over and over and over like it's just a feature you can't game without. If then new GPU you bought doesn't do DLSS, throw it away! So it triggers me and that's my fault.
I also think that DLSS is a little bit of gimmick to make use of extra compute hardware that is otherwise a solution looking for a problem. That's just my opinion, I don't need to try to change yours if you disagree
Maybe, but when they are turning it on at 1080p - or running at lower quality settings to squeeze out 1440p performance at 60 fps - but other wise you could have had a 1070 or 1660 Super this whole time at very similar prices - it makes me shrug. As the headline enhancement, meh.
It's interesting to see how much more people are willing to play for NVidia cards.
What?
With this card based on failed 3060 chips*, I feel supply is going to be anemic.
Why would nvidia make a 3050 when they could make a 3060? By basing this off failed 3060 chips, the supply is likely to be less then 1/10th that of the 3060.
They will probably use GA107 later. They are just going to burn through their stock of busted GA106 first.
This doesn't compete with the 6500XT because the street price is like to be 1.5x to 2+x the price of the 6500XT. Maybe rightfully so, but that's like saying a GTX 1650S drubs a RX560, and cost (back in the day) 1.5 to 2x more based on the flavor. That's not really a hot take.
On MSRP it isn't that much higher, and would be MUCH better value if you could get each at MSRP.
Street price is going to be that much higher, because people value it that much more, because it's better.
It's unfortunate, but right now every GPU is settling at the max that many people are willing to pay.
The question is going to be how close the real price will be to the 6600.
3050 Shuffle day at the Egg! Probably the one shot we will have at MSRP 😂
They top out at $489 for the Asus Astrid model - I did not check that box.
I did check the $329 box though - past that my enthusiasm wains.
I'm guessing any below $379 will go straight to eBay.
While the 6500xt definitely has a narrow use case i.e. PCIe 4.0/5.0 builds. It is still the best sub $300 card you can buy for those. Why would I risk tarnishing my reputation, and/or have systems I sold, come back for service, because I sold them with a less expensive, old, used card, on the wrong end of the bathtub curve?
This launch was the bad joke I surmised it would be. Not readily available, and the street price is derp. Wait they said. It'll be worth it they said. LULZ!
This card is not getting roasted properly. I'll do it myself. It's hot garbage. It is grossly overpriced, even at fairy magic MSRP/RRP for a card that has the performance of 70s series from half a decade ago. The reasons for it are readily evident, but that changes nothing. But I do get a good laugh at how, instead of pitchforks and torches outrage over performance and pricing. It is suddenly an interdasting cause for discussion.
While the 6500xt definitely has a narrow use case i.e. PCIe 4.0/5.0 builds. It is still the best sub $300 card you can buy for those. Why would I risk tarnishing my reputation, and/or have systems I sold, come back for service, because I sold them with a less expensive, old, used card, on the wrong end of the bathtub curve?
This card is not getting roasted properly. I'll do it myself. It's hot garbage. It is grossly overpriced, even at fairy magic MSRP/RRP for a card that has the performance of 70s series from half a decade ago. The reasons for it are readily evident, but that changes nothing. But I do get a good laugh at how, instead of pitchforks and torches outrage over performance and pricing. It is suddenly an interdasting cause for discussion.
Uh huh. How much do those cost right now, add to cart?The 3050 is a lot faster. The 6600 even more so.
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post.I mentioned this in the Ars comments on the 3050, but I think this 3000/Ampere generation has two alarming trends that I'm not terribly fond of: power and price. In regard to power, I don't know if Nvidia just wasn't happy with the performance at prior power levels (e.g. 250W at the high end), but having to consume an extra 100W just to hit what should be a generational performance gap isn't terribly impressive. What's worse is that I've always heard that you can sacrifice a relatively small amount of performance if you drop your voltage (and the resulting wattage) a bit. Doing that puts it close to the previous power targets, and it's still a higher performer. It also doesn't help that Ampere also had the benefit of a smaller node in addition to its upgraded architecture and still failed to hit good power targets.
Pricing is a hard thing to really talk about in some respects. The market is such a mess right now that it's hard to say how the 3000-series cards would've been priced if things were comparable to what we had 2-3 years ago. However, we can pick up on pricing trends that are arguably still getting worse. The 2000-series cards were the first to introduce the hefty $1200 pricing with the 2080 Ti, and we've seen the same with the 3080 Ti. The three cards that I've been mostly fine with this generation are the 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3080 (10GB) as they've had decent pricing overall. Albeit, I think it'd be far better if the 3060 didn't exist and the 3060 Ti was at the 3060's price point.
I think it's also worth mentioning that Nvidia branching out from simply graphics is also adding extra complexity and cost to cards, but I wonder how worthwhile it is to gamers in the end? For example, do we think that ray tracing has been worth the extra cost? Removing the RT cores would produce smaller dies and help ditch the RT tax related to all the R&D that it takes to handle it. On the other hand, it seems like the Tensor cores have been fairly useful for the AI processing with things like DLSS. It even gives us things like RTX Voice, which, to be fair, has been shown to work fine outside of RTX-based GPUs too.
Once again, fantasy stats, and woulda coulda shoulda, are all fine and well. They keep the discussion alive and lively. But reality is a harsh mistress, as the saying goes. Reality is, the 3050 is nigh impossible to buy, and its over $400 if you can. The rest is everyone wittingly or unwittingly, doing Nvidia's marketing and advertising department's job for them.I really think that the 3050 should have been 4GB (I think this is an issue with dram density?) and the mobile die and the 3050ti the 8GB cutdown 3060 die.
Even at $249 it would have been solidly better than the 6500xt and the $299 ti would have been MSRP priced closer to reality.
Oh well.