67 FPS average at 1440p across 9 games, anchored estimate · solid 60+ FPS 1440p gaming, with headroom in lighter titles
67 Avg FPS Includes estimates
Nothing here is a measurement of this card. It is an anchored estimate built from the cards we have run ourselves, on the identical suite. Across our 9-game suite at 1440p, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 averages 67 FPS. The ceiling is Counter-Strike 2 at 112 FPS; the floor is Alan Wake 2 at 42 FPS, a 2.7x spread that tells you how engine-dependent this class of card is. In practical terms that means solid 60+ FPS 1440p gaming, with headroom in lighter titles. Under load we logged a peak of 163W against the 170W rating.
| Benchmark | Result | 1% Low | VRAM Used | Power | Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 1440p · Ultra | 50 FPS | 40 | 6.75 GB | 162 W | Estimated |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 1440p · Favor Quality | 57 FPS | 44 | 6.57 GB | 158 W | Estimated |
| Alan Wake 2 1440p · High | 42 FPS | 35 | 9.49 GB | 156 W | Estimated |
| Baldur's Gate 3 1440p · Ultra | 81 FPS | 66 | 7 GB | 163 W | Estimated |
| Black Desert Online 1440p · Remastered | 85 FPS | 54 | 5.29 GB | 162 W | Estimated |
| Counter-Strike 2 1440p · Very High | 112 FPS | 61 | 7.13 GB | 136 W | Estimated |
| Diablo 4 1440p · Ultra | 70 FPS | 53 | 9.84 GB | 160 W | Estimated |
| Escape from Tarkov 1440p · Ultra | 60 FPS | 44 | 11.04 GB | 146 W | Estimated |
| The Witcher 3 1440p · Ultra | 46 FPS | 39 | 7.05 GB | 162 W | Estimated |
| Architecture | Ampere (GA106) |
| CUDA cores | 3,584 |
| VRAM | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus | 192-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 360 GB/s |
| Boost clock | 1,777 MHz |
| TDP | 170 W |
| Process | 8nm (Samsung) |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| Release date | 2021-02-25 |
| Launch MSRP | $329 |
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 averages 67 FPS at 1440p on our suite. Nothing here is a measurement of this card. It is an anchored estimate built from the cards we have run ourselves, on the identical suite.
100% = this card, Gaming headline metric (Avg FPS). #47 of 82 desktop cards in this vertical.
| GPU | Relative | % | Avg FPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Arc B580 | 106% | 71 | |
| AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT | 104% | 70 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti | 104% | 70 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 | 103% | 69 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 | 100% | 67 | |
| AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT | 99% | 66 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 | 97% | 65 | |
| Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition | 97% | 65 | |
| AMD Radeon RX 6700 | 94% | 63 |
Same card, other workloads: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 AI benchmarks, LLM tokens/sec, image generation & VRAM fit
| Transistors | 12,000 million |
| Die size | 276 mm² |
| Fabricated by | Samsung |
| Transistor density | 43.5 million per mm² |
Denser than 38% of the 76 cards we have silicon data for. Density is the clearest measure of what a process node bought: a card that gained it without growing the die got its speed from the fab rather than the architecture.
Silicon figures from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Benchmarks on this page are our own. Compare every chip.
Whole-job timings, composed from our measured per-model results on this card.
| Workflow | Time | Energy | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full codebase review | 28.2 min | 69.16 Wh | measured |
Can't run: 60-second AI short film (needs Qwen3 32B), 60-second AI short film, narrated (needs Qwen3 32B), 10 short social clips (needs Qwen3 32B), 40-product photo shoot (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev), 6-panel comic page (needs Qwen3 32B), 20 long-form articles (needs Llama 3.3 70B), Character sheet, 12 poses (needs FLUX.1 dev), 100-photo restoration batch (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev), 24-frame storyboard (needs Qwen3 32B), 100-photo restore and enlarge (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev).
This card is $329 to buy. The cheapest listed rate on Vast.ai is $0.034/hour, but that is the floor: we budget $0.041/hour, a 20% premium, because idle time, storage and unavailable cheap instances all land on the same bill. At that rate buying wins after 8,064 GPU-hours. Below it you are paying for idle silicon.
| How you would use it | GPU-hours a year | Rental cost a year | Time to break even |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 hours a day, hobby | 730 | $30 | 11.0 years |
| 8 hours a day, working on it | 2,920 | $119 | 2.8 years |
| 24/7, always-on agent | 8,760 | $357 | 11.0 months |
At hobby usage this card is very unlikely to pay for itself before it is superseded. Rent it. Rental figures include a 20% premium over the cheapest listed rate. Ignores electricity, resale and the fact that a rented card can be a newer one tomorrow.
Cheapest of the RunPod and Vast on-demand rates we see, sampled daily. Spot and interruptible pricing runs lower.