Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050: A Truly Modern GPU for the Masses

The GeForce RTX 3050 delivers great 1080p gaming performance and modern features let's hope it stays in stock at a sane price.

- By Brad Chacos

A year and a half into the latest generation of graphics cards (fave.co/3DOEUWk)-one that has been plagued by chip shortages, logistics woes, tariffs, crypto demand, and scalpers—we're finally starting to see the first GPUs for PC gamers on a tighter budget. And as the GeForce RTX 3050 we're reviewing here shows, Nvidia and AMD couldn't be going about it any more differently.

AMD landed the first strike. The Radeon RX 6500 XT (fave.co/32rhOJT) arrived just last week, and AMD made some hard compromises (fave.co/3IgowHc) to hit its low $199 price point. AMD's cheap card strips out various features we've typically come to expect, and packs just 4GB of onboard a memory with a scant 64-bit bus. That'll help it evade the attention of crypto miners (fave. co/3GVju27) and hopefully free up supply on the streets, but AMD's memory approach restricts the 6500 XT to 1080p gaming on Medium or High settings. Push beyond that, and performance stumbles hard.

Nvidia, on the other hand, takes the opposite route with the $250 GeForce RTX 3050. It’s essentially a traditional graphics card, using a cut-down RTX 3060 GPU (fave.co/3lUcqKX) with 8GB of VRAM and a standard 128-bit memory bus. This bad boy is built to run games with eye candy cranked up and those glorious real-time rays a-tracin’.

The memory configuration will likely make the RTX 3050 more attractive to miners (though it wields Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate tech [fave.co/3Ie1Cjv]), so we’ll have to see whether it or the Radeon RX 6500 XT wind up more widely available on the streets. But there’s no question that the RTX 3050 absolutely spanks AMD’s GPU in the benchmark sheets. Let’s dig in.