When looking at the mainstream segment of the market, a 60 Ti class of GPU is generally considered the sweet spot for gaming, offering up solid performance for a somewhat reasonable price point, and with the huge popularity of the 3060 Ti when it launched back in December of 2020, we want to see if upgrading to the latest RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is a viable option for those looking to play the latest AAA titles where their trusty Ampere GPU may be starting to show signs of struggling.
So for those still running an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, which admittedly, was a very potent GPU for its time, especially given its $399 price tag, but now in 2025, that 8GB VRAM buffer on a 256-bit memory bus will start to show its age, especially if wanting to play at slightly higher resolutions, or simply enabling higher quality settings or of course Ray Tracing in some of the latest titles.
RTX 3060 Ti Vs RTX 5060 Ti
Now, as you know, NVIDIA did release two models of the 5060 Ti back in April of this year. However, the 8GB model has gone somewhat by the wayside, even with NVIDIA not wanting to push it as much as the 16GB version, especially given the fact that 8GB just doesn’t cut it with games getting more demanding so the logical step forward, for those who didn’t adopt the RTX 4060 Ti, is to move up to the 5060 Ti, but with both the 8GB and 16GB models both utilising a paltry 128-bit memory interface. However, at $429, considering we’re almost 5 years on, you could argue that $30 more for double the VRAM compared to the 3060 Ti is a good buy, though then nerfing it with a cut-down memory bus, much like we saw on the 4060 Ti was a bad move.
GDDR6 vs GDDR7
To play devil’s advocate though, due to GDDR7 on the 5060 Ti compared to GDDR6 on the 3060 Ti, even with the halved memory bus, we still end up with 448GB/s of bandwidth over the memory and an effective double memory speed at 28Gbps compared to 14Gbps on the 3060 Ti, hence the identical 448GB/s bandwidth on both cards, so very much a point of same same, but different, but still same.
Now obviously we’ve already reviewed the 5060 Ti, so we don’t want to stomp over old ground, especially given that our general consensus was that it basically felt like a 4060 Ti V2, but if we look at the typical gamer and how they would generally skip a generation, I wanted to see if the 5060 Ti 16GB gives enough of an uplift to warrant the move from the trusty Ampere platform, focussing purely on rasterisation performance.
Hardware
Sure, the newer Blackwell architecture gives a whole host of other goodies including stronger Ray Tracing performance along with improved DLSS upscaling with frame generation, but today is more about an apples-to-apples comparison, so we’ve taken both cards and thrown them onto our GPU test system with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB 6000MHz CL30 memory on a Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master motherboard. All testing was done on the latest version of Windows with the latest updates, and for our testing, we used the latest NVIDIA 581.80 Game Ready driver. We’ll be looking at 1080p, 1440p and 4K results today, and focusing on the performance uplift that you’d see going from the 3060 Ti 8GB card up to the 5060 Ti 16GB GPU. We’ll also be putting all of our test results over on our Patreon, so if you want to check them out while also supporting the channel with everything that we do, the link for that is down below.
So with that out of the way, let’s get into those glorious benchmarks.
