In-Game Benchmarks
Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 9 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of if turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. In total, each video card is tested 48 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.
So how did the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition perform? Well, 1080p performance is great with 10 of the 16 results coming in over 120 FPS and the other 6 are all in the 60-119 FPS range. Now 1440p is what Nvidia had the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition targeted at in the documentation they shared with us and it does still do surprisingly well there as well with 5 in over 120 FPS and 10 over 60. There is one under 60 FPS which was Total War: Three Kingdoms at the Ultra detail setting at 57.9 FPS which isn’t too far off the mark. 4K on the other hand is where the big dropoff is but even then there are still 8 games that were over 60 FPS. Then 7 were playable but not smooth and one wasn’t playable at all under 30 FPS.
Just going through comparing the claim of the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition being faster than the RTX 2080 SUPER does hold up across almost all of our game tests. Total War Three Kingdoms hated the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition for some reason and had it down under the RTX 2070, even after retests in both 4K and 1440p but still did well at 1080p somehow. Beyond that, each of the rest of the charts could be a clone of each other, the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition was surprisingly consistent.