NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB Review with a custom card. Is the MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio the new Ampere entry-level drug?

1 - Introduction, technical data and test system 2 - Teardown, PCB and cooler in detail 3 - Gaming Performance Full-HD 4 - Gaming Performance WQHD 5 - Details: Frames per Second (Curve) 6 - Details: Percentiles (Curve) 7 - Details: Frame Times (Curve) 8 - Details: Frame Times (Bar) 9 - Details: Variances (Bar) 10 - Studio Applications 11 - 12 - Power Cinsumption, Transients and PSU recommendation 13 - Temperatures, clock rate and infrared 14 - Fan speed and noise 15 - NVIDIA Broadcast - more than a gimmick? 16 - Summary, features and conlusion

Rendering

This is where things get really interesting, as Arnold is Autodesk’s latest ray tracing renderer designed to meet the demands of feature length animation and visual effects. Arnold is used in over 300 studios worldwide, including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures among others. Arnold has also been the primary renderer on dozens of films, from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity . He is available as a standalone renderer for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and as a plug-in for Maya, 3ds Max , Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana.

NVIDIA and Autodesk have collaborated to accelerate ray tracing in Arnold with RTX GPUs. This allows artists to work more interactively with their models and spend less time waiting for their hardware. The combination of fast RTX-accelerated rendering and GPU-accelerated AI denoising also enables rapid iteration through changes in materials, lighting, camera position, and environment, and the effects are visible with lightning-fast updates.

You can see the advantage of the RTX cards over the older Pascal models very clearly, as the slowest Turing RTX is still almost twice as fast as the older Pascal flagship. And the new GeForce RTX 3060? The is almost on par with a RTX 2080 Ti , not even bad.

Blender is an extremely popular free and above all also open source 3D suite. It supports almost the full range of 3D pipeline modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing, and 2D animation. So basically almost everything that the topic gives. Since the release of update 2.81, Blender now supports RTX-accelerated rendering using the NVIDIA OptiX rendering API in the Cycles renderer.

This shortens render times on NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs and again speeds up render output immensely compared to CUDA or OpenCL. Measuring final render times is a great way to evaluate GPU capabilities when it comes to working efficiently and as unobstructed as possible. The GeForce RTX 3060 is faster than the RTX 2080 Super and Quadro RTX 5000, as it was in Maya including Arnold.

DaVinci Resolve 16 is the latest version of Black Magic Design’s video editing software that combines professional editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post-production. You can switch between editing, color, effects, and audio in real time while editing video footage at up to 8K resolution. Core functions in Resolve are accelerated by both CUDA and OpenCL, including RAW file processing, color correction, advanced video filters, and compositing.

The latest version 16 also introduces even more new GPU-accelerated features, including scopes and features that use the new DaVinci Neural Engine, which relies on machine learning to enable powerful new features such as face detection, speed warp motion estimation, automatic face tracking and enhancement, super scaling, automatic color and smart color matching.

The sample project for the first benchmark uses this footage in full 4K resolution without down-sampling or using any proxies. Additionally, the SuperScale upsampling example uses a 4K ProRES and an HD H.264 video file.

Who doesn’t know it? Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC is quite a popular image editing and digital asset management tool for photographers to significantly improve the quality of their images when using RAW formats by changing properties such as white point, exposure, color and hue. While Adobe Lightroom uses basic GPU acceleration when editing and displaying images in the viewport, the latest version of Lightroom now also uses GPU-accelerated AI to improve detail.

Using the Sensei AI platform, Adobe engineers trained a neural network to demosaic RAW images with a focus on the problem area of RAW file interpolation. The detail enhancement feature uses the RTX tensor cores to process RAW files via the neural network (on GPUs without tensor cores, this feature uses normal GPU computation). The result is the ability to extract more image detail from the original RAW file than is possible with the traditional interpolation method. The older Pascal and Vega cards perform significantly worse here in the end in terms of computing time.