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 | |
| NVIDIA TITAN Xp | 96% | 64 |
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 |
| Process node | 8 nm |
| Fabricated by | Samsung |
| Transistor density | 43.5 million per mm² |
Denser than 78% of the 746 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: Animate a batch of images (needs Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (image to video)), Product photo shoot (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev), Photo restoration batch (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev), Restore and enlarge photos (needs FLUX.1 Kontext dev), Character sheet, 12 poses (needs FLUX.1 dev), Short social clips (needs Qwen3 32B), 60-second AI short film (needs Qwen3 32B), 24-frame storyboard (needs Qwen3 32B), 6-panel comic page (needs Qwen3 32B), Long-form article batch (needs Llama 3.3 70B).
This card is $329 to buy. The cheapest listed rate on Vast.ai is $0.056/hour, but that is the floor: we budget $0.067/hour, a 20% premium, because idle time, storage and unavailable cheap instances all land on the same bill. At that rate buying wins after 4,896 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 | $49 | 6.7 years |
| 8 hours a day, working on it | 2,920 | $196 | 1.7 years |
| 24/7, always-on agent | 8,760 | $589 | 6.7 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.