3DMark shows the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti offering good value for money against the likes of the GeForce RTX 3070

NVIDIA may not have announced it yet, but the RTX 3060 Ti is definitely almost upon us. The volume of benchmark leaks in the last two weeks practically confirms as much, and implies that chosen reviewers are testing their cards ahead of the card's announcement next week. Apparently, NVIDIA will announce the RTX 3060 Ti on December 2, so reviews for the card may start appearing within a week or so.

This time, Videocardz has spotted the RTX 3060 Ti on 3DMark. The upcoming card has been benchmarked in Fire Strike and Time Spy, offering a hint of its performance. The screenshots published by Videocardz report the RTX 3060 Ti scoring 30,706 points in Fire Strike and 12,175 points in Time Spy, which are both respectable scores for a card that is rumoured to retail for US$399.

As expected, the RTX 3060 Ti outscores the RTX 2080 SUPER by a small margin, with the Ampere card averaging a 5% lead of the high-end Turing-based one. The RTX 3060 Ti is not that far off the RTX 3070 either, despite its inferior specifications. Manli, a board partner of NVIDIA, has already confirmed that the RTX 3060 Ti will have 4,864 CUDA cores and a boost clock of 1,665 MHz, which gives the card a 1,024 CUDA core and a 60 MHz disadvantage on the RTX 3070. Similarly, the RTX 3060 Ti has fewer Tensor and RT cores, although it seemingly has the same 8 GB of VRAM as the RTX 3070.

Based on the figures provided by Videocardz, the RTX 3060 Ti averages 88% of the performance of the RTX 3070 in the two benchmarks. However, the former is expected to retail for 79% of the retail price of the latter, so NVIDIA's upcoming budget Ampere card may offer better value for money than the RTX 3070. Unsurprisingly, the RTX 3060 Ti falls a way behind the RTX 3080, which uses NVIDIA's GA102 GPU. Additionally, the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT blow the RTX 3060 Ti away, but the latter will be a lot cheaper than AMD's RDNA2 cards. NVIDIA reputedly has more budget Ampere cards planned too, along with the RTX 3080 Ti, so there may be a lot more to come from the RTX 3000 series yet, including mobile options.