The 8GB version of the soft-launched Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 (opens in new tab) was tested by Hardware Unboxed (opens in new tab) and found to fall horribly short, despite offering no cost savings so far.

The typical performance shortfall against the original 12GB model (open in new tab) is about 15-20%, with some games dropping as much as 26% at 1080p. Put another way, the 12GB card is 35% faster at 1080p.

Furthermore, taking Newegg as a reasonably representative retail price sample, the current prices for the 8GB and 12GB models are the same; Newegg's cheapest 8GB RTX 3060 is $359, the same for both cards (open in new tab).

It is worth understanding that the lack of performance of the 8GB card is not simply a matter of insufficient graphics memory. Both cards use the same GA104 GPU silicon, have the same number of shaders (3,584), and in fact have the same official boost clock of 1,777 MHz. But there are other important differences. First, the 8GB bus is 128 bits, whereas the 12GB bus is 192 bits. As a result, the total bandwidth is reduced to 224 GB/s versus 360 GB/s. In addition, the 12GB L2 cache is increased by 50%.

As a result, for some games, the 12GB card will have a tremendous performance advantage. The worst example is "Dying Light 2" (open in new tab): at 1080p and high graphics settings, the 12GB card runs 35% faster than the 8GB. That means 69 fps vs. 51 fps. In the same test, the much-maligned Intel Arc A770 (open in new tab) GPU recorded 85 fps.

Halo Infinite (open in new tab) is perhaps a bit more representative of the typical performance gap, with the 12GB card showing a 21% improvement at 1080p Ultra over the new 8GB board. In other words, it's an ugly showing for the 8GB.

The problem here is twofold. First, the very idea of paying the same money for significantly less performance is disastrous. But even if 8GB were much cheaper - something that may happen in the future - the duplication of brands could eventually become a problem.

Is it reasonable to expect someone unfamiliar with GPU history to understand at a glance how much difference there is between these two RTX 3060 boards?

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that this dual RTX 3060 situation is any better than the confusion caused by the two RTX 4080s that Nvidia announced in October; Nvidia has recognized the problems caused by two cards with nearly identical brand names but vastly different performance, and has been working to address these issues by Recognizing this, they did not announce the unnecessary RTX 4080 12GB.

We feel almost the same way. For now, we look forward to getting our hands on this 8GB card and testing it ourselves.