Nvidia was busy at CES, announcing a range of new products for gamers to look forward to. As well as the top-end RTX 3090 Ti, that everyone wants but no one will get, they also announced a few other GPUs, including the RTX 3050. If you've been looking at a new GPU, you may be wondering about the RTX 3050 power specifications, and what sort of performance it might offer. That's the question we'll be addressing for you. By the end of this article, you'll have a much better sense of whether this GPU is going to be sufficient for your needs or not.
How Many Teraflops is the RTX 3050
Without getting too complicated, teraflops are the number of mathematical computations your GPU can complete per second. As a general rule, the more teraflops, the more computations, and therefore the faster the GPU will be. Of course, there are other factors at play, but we aren't going to worry about those. Because, like a man opening some flat-pack furniture and ignoring the instructions, we just want to get to the end. So here's what you need to know.
The basic details are as follows: the RTX 3050 contains 9 shader teraflops, 18 RT teraflops, and 73 Tensor teraflops. While these won't exactly have the top end GPUs shaking in their boots (the RTX 3090 Ti has 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, and 285 Tensor teraflops for comparison) the RTX 3050 still represents a significant upgrade over previous budget GPUs.
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How Many Gigabytes is the RTX 3050?
Again, we don't want to get overly complicated with this. So as another rule of thumb, the more memory, the more data the GPU can hold, and therefore the better the performance will be. This translates to things like higher texture quality and higher resolutions.
The RTX 3050 offers 8GB of GDDR6 - GDDR6 being the latest RAM technology. So this will offer solid performance, especially when compared to a lot of GPUs from previous generations. Crucially, the RTX 3050 offers DLSS, and this is what's going to be the real game-changer. No pun intended.
DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, should you care. It's a tech that enables a less powerful GPU to upscale graphics in games. Translation: even if the GPU has less grunt, you can still enjoy higher frame rates and graphical resolution than you'd otherwise expect from the same hardware. So playing games in 1080p resolution, and even enjoying ray tracing, aren't out the question with this GPU. Nvidia state that you'll be able to enjoy ray-tracing on games at 60fps.
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Final Thoughts
The crucial thing to remember is that the RTX 3050 isn't trying to compete with top-end GPUs like the 3090 Ti. With a price starting at £239/$249 when it launches on January 27th, it's certainly much more towards the budget end of the market. It's potentially up to ten times cheaper than the RTX 3090 Ti. But performance will not be ten times lower.
Does the RTX 3050 power spec sheet offer enough? The RTX 3050 will almost certainly be sufficient for most people to enjoy PC gaming with acceptable levels of performance. Especially for anyone who is upgrading from a much older GPU. Three of the most popular GPUs currently used by PC gamers on Steam are GTX 50 models. The RTX 3050 will be a significant upgrade over any of those, and at a relatively affordable price.
That is, of course, assuming you can actually get hold of one. We don't yet know what availability will look like, given the worldwide chip shortages that seem to show little sign of easing. But at least we're beginning to see what has been traditionally the preserve of much more expensive GPUs starting to become more affordable.
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