MSI GeForce RTX 3050 GAMING X 8G Gaming Graphics Card - 8GB GDDR6X, 1845 MHz, PCI Express Gen 4 x 8, 128-bit, 3x DP v 1.4a, HDMI 2.1 (Supports 4K)

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The 6500 XT turns in one of its better figures in Far Cry 6 and as a result the 3050 was just 14% faster, though the issue for the 6500 XT is PCIe 3.0 and when compared to that configuration the 3050 was 37% faster. The RTX 3050 blasted past that result with 87 fps on average, edging it slightly ahead of the GTX 1660 Super this time. That made it 34% faster than the 6500 XT or 85% faster when limiting the 6500 XT to PCIe 3.0. A super easy win here for Nvidia. The game was playable with ray tracing enabled and DLSS, delivering ~60 fps on average. Without DLSS, the frame rate dropped into the low 40s, and that's about the same level of ray tracing performance than you can expect from the RX 6600 in this title. If you are after one of the best budget graphics cards, you are looking in the right place. Even as the cheapest graphics card in the RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3050 offers up NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for AI-enhanced image reconstruction in games, real-time raytracing and more.

If that's the case, then you're best off being upsold to the RX 6600, or perhaps the smarter option would be to look for a cheaper second hand option to tie you over. The 6500 XT does crumble at 1440p, whereas the RTX 3050 remains strong, turning in over 60 fps on average to make it 42% faster. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. Turning on ray tracing with the medium quality setting + DLSS dropped the average frame rate to 60 fps, which is still very playale, but personally I'd rather play the game with a higher quality preset and perhaps leave DLSS enabled.When compared to the 6500 XT, we're looking at a 37% performance boost, or a massive 74% increase when compared to the PCIe 3.0 result. So, while the benchmarks highlight where the RTX 3050 is more or less akin to the GTX 1660 Ti in terms of its straight gaming performance, there is the promise of DLSS working those Tensor Cores to actually make the card a pretty capable 1440p gaming GPU where the technology is enabled.

Starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, using the medium quality preset at 1080p, we find that the RTX 3050 is good for 79 fps on average, so here it's basically a GTX 1660 Super. That made it 18% faster than the 6500 XT using PCIe 4.0, and 30% faster when compared to the PCIe 3.0 configuration. It was also only 8% slower than the RTX 2060, a decent result overall.

As we often saw, the 1440p data is even more brutal for the 6500 XT. Here the RTX 3050 was 54% faster, or 85% faster when comparing PCIe 3.0 performance. The RTX 3050 also averaged 74 fps, meaning it was more often than not good for over 60 fps at 1440p using respectable quality settings in many titles. Ray Tracing Performance Moving to 1440p increases the margin in favor of the 3050, which is now 66% faster than the 6500 XT when using PCI 4.0 and 128% faster than the PCIe 3.0 configuration. We're also looking at slightly better performance than the GTX 1660 Super.