Yikes, the brand new GeForce RTX 3050 is slower than the GTX 1660 Ti and RTX 2060

After over half a year of testing GeForce RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 laptops, the lower-end RTX 3050 is finally becoming widely available on devices like the XPS 17 or Inspiron 16 Plus. We came in with reasonably high expectations for the mobile RTX 3050 since the mobile GTX 1660 Ti would perform closer than expected to the mobile RTX 2060, but initial results are painting a disappointing picture.

Dell was kind enough to send us an Inspiron 16 Plus equipped with the RTX 3050 and, after trying out almost two dozen different tiles, the system would almost always come out slower than the GTX 1660 Ti. Examples include Final Fantasy XV, Witcher 3, Far Cry New Dawn, F1 2020, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla where our RTX 3050 would be behind the average GTX 1660 Ti laptop by about 15 percent, 8 percent, 13 percent, 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively. By extension, this also puts the mobile RTX 3050 well behind the older mobile RTX 2060.

What's responsible for the slower-than-expected performance? Nvidia neutered the number of texture mapping units and memory bandwidth on the RTX 3050 when compared to the GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060 which we suspect to be the main culprits. A closer look at GPU-Z reveals just 64 TMUs and a 128-bit bus compared to 96 TMUs and a 192-bit bus on the GTX 1660 Ti or 120 TMUs and 192-bit bus on the RTX 2060. RAM has also been cut from 6 GB to 4 GB to further limit the performance of the GPU at higher resolutions and settings beyond 1080p.

We'll continue to test more RTX 3050 laptops as they come in especially since there will likely be models with higher TGP targets for potentially faster performance than our 50 W to 65 W Dell sample. Even so, you might want to consider laptops with the GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060 instead to maximize gaming performance since such models are usually on sale nowadays for less than the RTX 3050.