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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh: Power and Efficiency for Mobile Devices

April 2025

Introduction

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh is an updated version of the popular mobile graphics card that maintains a balance between performance, energy efficiency, and affordability. In 2025, it remains in demand among gamers and professionals who value mobility. Let’s explore what makes this model noteworthy and who it’s suitable for.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh is based on an updated version of the Ada Lovelace Lite architecture, optimized for mobile devices. This has improved power consumption and thermal output without sacrificing performance.

Manufacturing Process: The card is produced using TSMC's 5nm technology, which results in a high transistor density and a 15% reduction in power consumption compared to the previous generation.

Unique Features:

- RTX (Ray Tracing): Supports real-time ray tracing, including enhanced algorithms for reflections and shadows.

- DLSS 3.5: Artificial intelligence boosts image resolution with minimal quality loss, increasing FPS by 40-70% in games with active Ray Tracing.

- NVIDIA Reflex: Reduces input lag in competitive games (e.g., Valorant, CS:2).

- Support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): An unexpected move by NVIDIA — compatibility with competitors' open technologies.

2. Memory: Speed and Capacity

Type and Capacity: The card is equipped with 6 GB GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit bus. Although this is a modest amount for 2025, it is sufficient for most games at medium settings.

Bandwidth: 192 GB/s is a modest figure, but intelligent data caching through NVIDIA’s Memory Boost compensates for the limitations.

Impact on Performance:

- In games with high texture demands (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty), there may be stuttering at ultra settings due to insufficient VRAM.

- For professional tasks (rendering in Blender), 6 GB is the minimum acceptable threshold, but it suffices for basic editing in DaVinci Resolve.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p — Ideal Format:

- Apex Legends (high settings, DLSS Quality): 110-130 FPS.

- The Elder Scrolls VI (medium settings, RTX Off): 75-90 FPS.

- Alan Wake 2 (medium settings, RTX Medium + DLSS 3.5): 60-65 FPS.

1440p: Only suitable for less demanding projects or with active DLSS/FSR. For example, Fortnite on high settings yields 50-60 FPS.

4K: Not recommended — even in CS:2, the frame rate drops below 60 FPS.

Ray Tracing: Activating RTX reduces FPS by 30-40%, but DLSS 3.5 restores smoothness. In Cyberpunk 2077 with RTX Medium and DLSS, the card maintains 45-50 FPS at 1080p.

4. Professional Tasks

Video Editing:

- In Premiere Pro, rendering a 4K video takes 20% less time compared to the previous generation, thanks to 2048 CUDA cores.

- NVENC accelerates H.265 export — a 10-minute video is processed in 3-4 minutes.

3D Modeling:

- In Blender, rendering a BMW scene takes ~12 minutes (down from ~18 minutes for the RTX 2050 Mobile).

- For complex scenes with 8K textures, memory may be inadequate — better to opt for the RTX 3060.

Scientific Calculations:

- Support for CUDA and OpenCL makes the card suitable for basic machine learning tasks (e.g., training neural networks on medium-sized datasets).

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output

TDP: 75 W — a moderate figure for mobile GPUs.

Cooling Recommendations:

- Laptops with the RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh should have at least two fans and heat pipes.

- Avoid ultra-thin cases — throttling may occur under prolonged loads.

Tips:

- Use cooling pads during gaming.

- Regularly clean ventilation grilles from dust.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6600M:

- Pros: 8 GB GDDR6, better performance at 1440p.

- Cons: Weaker in RTX tasks, no equivalent to DLSS 3.5. Price: $550-600.

Intel Arc A580M:

- Pros: Cheaper ($450-500), support for AV1 encoding.

- Cons: Drivers are still less stable, lower performance in DX11 games.

Conclusion: The RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh wins on DLSS and stability, but falls short in memory capacity.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply: The laptop should have at least a 150 W adapter.

Compatibility:

- Supports PCIe 4.0 x8.

- Optimal for platforms with Intel Core i5 13th generation or AMD Ryzen 5 7000 processors.

Drivers:

- Update via GeForce Experience — NVIDIA regularly releases optimizations for new games.

- Avoid beta versions unless you're prepared for potential bugs.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Excellent energy efficiency.

- Support for DLSS 3.5 and RTX.

- Affordable price ($500-600 for laptops with this card).

Cons:

- Only 6 GB of VRAM.

- Limited performance at 1440p+.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh For?

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

1. Gamers playing at Full HD on medium to high settings.

2. Students and freelancers needing a mobile workstation for editing and 3D modeling.

3. Travelers who appreciate a balance between laptop weight and performance.

If you are not willing to overpay for top models but want modern technologies such as ray tracing, the RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh will be a reliable companion until 2027.

Prices are current as of April 2025. Please check for deals from official NVIDIA resellers before purchasing.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

July 2022

Model Name

GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh

Generation

GeForce 30 Mobile

Base Clock

1237MHz

Boost Clock

1492MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x8

Transistors

Unknown

RT Cores

Tensor Cores

Tensor Cores are specialized processing units designed specifically for deep learning, providing higher training and inference performance compared to FP32 training. They enable rapid computations in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and personalized recommendations. The two most notable applications of Tensor Cores are DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AI Denoiser for noise reduction.

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

Samsung

Process Size

8 nm

Architecture

Ampere

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

6GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

96bit

Memory Clock

1500MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

144.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

47.74 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

95.49 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

6.111 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

95.49 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

6.233 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

2048

L1 Cache

128 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

2MB

TDP

75W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

CUDA

8.6

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

6.233 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro M6000

6.707 +7.6%

RTX A500 Embedded

6.531 +4.8%

GeForce RTX 3050 Mobile Refresh

6.233

Radeon RX 480

5.951 -4.5%

GeForce GTX 1070 Max Q

5.761 -7.6%