RTX and DLSS

Being an RTX card I also like checking out the performance of some of Nvidia’s features. Namely the ray tracing performance and the performance improvements you can see by using DLSS combined with the tensor cores. My first test goes back to our synthetic benchmarks with 3DMark where I check out their Port Royal benchmark. This is the one test that does also have AMD Ray Tracing support which is great to get a look at how different cards including older non-RTX cards perform. The RTX 3050 XC Black over doubled the score compared to the GTX 1080 and was well ahead of the GTX 1080 Ti which both don’t have ray tracing specific cores. It is of course the lowest end RTX card so it is 700 points below the RTX 2060 and nearer to the RX 6600 from AMD.

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3DMark also has added in a few feature tests, one being a look at DLSS performance. For this one, I have the resolution set to 1440p and DLSS 2.0 turned on. I then have run the test on every card supported to get a comparison on how their test performs with and without DLSS. There are a couple of things that this test shows up. It does let us see how Nvidia’s DLSS capable cards compare. But it also shows just how much of a performance improvement you can potentially see with DLSS when things are completely optimized. The RTX 3050 XC Black jumped up 151% when turning it on. For comparison, the RTX 3060 went up 143% and the 3080 Ti 119%. DLSS helps the lower-end cards even more than the higher-end cards.

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I then jumped into game tests, this time with Watch Dogs: Legion. For this one, I wanted to get an idea of the performance you will see when taking advantage of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS features. I tested at 4k with the ultra detail setting and with ultra being the setting for DLSS and RTX when they are on as well. I then test with no RTX or DLSS on and then with RTX DLSS on and off and on together. Here the results can be a little hard to sort through because I do have some of the older 1000 series cards in the results as well which don’t have DLSS support so we just have RTX and non-RTX numbers. The RTX 3050 XC Black sits down in between the GTX 1080 and the RTX 2060 when we have things sorted by the no RTX or DLSS results. With DLSS on the 3050 and 2060 have the same FPS and the RTX 3050 XC Black is 3 FPS ahead of the 2060 when we have both RTX and DLSS on showing that the tensor and RT core improvements for the 3000 series do help.

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Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which we have used for testing for a long time now. This test is similar as well with it set to 4K and Ultra detail, I use the included benchmark to test DLSS and RTX individually and then with them both on and both off to give us a look at overall frame rates depending on which direction you go. For this test the RTX 3050, XC Black is back down below the GTX 1070 because I have the result sorted by the no RTX or DLSS results. I’m surprised that DLSS didn’t help the lower-end cards here at all on both tests that DLSS was turned on.

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Next, I tested using a benchmark based on the game Boundary. For this one, I wanted to see how all of the different DLSS settings would perform, including turning it off completely. This is run using the free benchmark and with the resolution set to 4k and RTX on. I have the graph sorted by the DLSS off numbers but if we look closely this is the only result where the RTX 3050 XC Black was out ahead of the RTX 2060. As for the DLSS setting comparisons, the RTX 3050 XC Black was basically unplayable in all of the results except for when DLSS Ultra Performance was turned on which almost doubled the FPS over the other DLSS results and was 5 times faster than the RTX 3050 XC Black with DLSS turned completely off. Let’s not forget this is testing at 4K with a card that isn’t at all designed for 4K and DLSS managed to make it playable on the one setting at least.

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The last tests were done in a benchmark based on the game Bright Memory with their free steam benchmark. This is similar to the previous Boundary test only it is looking at RTX settings individually with the resolution set to 4K and DLSS is set to the balanced setting. Once again it isn’t a surprise that the RTX 3050 XC Black is down at the bottom of the chart here, it is still the lowest end RTX card. But it is interesting to see how the different RTX settings affect the card. With the highest detail it was down to 13 FPS and the lowest it was at 22 FPS. None were playable, but at 4K with RTX on that isn’t a big shock. It does however show the wiggle room games that have different RTX detail settings can offer for lower-end cards like this when you are trying to fine tune things to get the best image quality while still being smooth.

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