NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile: The Perfect Balance for Mobile Gamers and Professionals

April 2025

Since the release of the Ampere architecture, NVIDIA has continued to impress with its combination of performance and energy efficiency. In this article, we will explore why the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile remains a popular choice for laptops even in 2025 and who should pay attention to it.


1. Architecture and Key Features: Ampere in a Compact Format

The RTX 3050 Ti Mobile is built on the Ampere architecture, released in 2020. Despite its age, this technology remains relevant due to optimizations and support for modern features. The card is manufactured using Samsung's 8nm process, providing a balance between performance and heat generation.

Key Features:

- RTX (Ray Tracing): Hardware ray tracing for realistic lighting and shadows.

- DLSS 2.4+: Artificial intelligence improves FPS without sacrificing quality, especially at resolutions up to 1440p.

- NVIDIA Reflex: Reduces input latency in esports titles (e.g., Valorant or CS:GO).

- Support for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): Although FSR is an AMD technology, many games that support it (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077) also run on NVIDIA, expanding optimization options.


2. Memory: Speed vs. Capacity

The graphics card is equipped with 4 GB GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus. The bandwidth is 224 GB/s (14 Gbps), which is sufficient for most games at high settings in 1080p.

Impact on Performance:

- In modern titles from 2024-2025 (Starfield, GTA VI), the memory capacity may become a bottleneck at ultra texture settings. However, DLSS/FSR partially compensates for this.

- For professional tasks (rendering in Blender), 4 GB is the minimum, but it will suffice for basic editing in DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere.


3. Gaming Performance: 1080p – the Sweet Spot

The RTX 3050 Ti Mobile is aimed at comfortable gaming in Full HD. Examples of FPS (High settings, without RT):

- Cyberpunk 2077 (2023): 55–60 FPS (with DLSS Quality).

- Hogwarts Legacy (2024): 50–55 FPS (DLSS Balanced).

- Apex Legends: 90–100 FPS.

Ray Tracing:

Activating RT lowers FPS by 30–40%, but DLSS restores smoothness. For instance, in Minecraft RTX, the card delivers 45–50 FPS with DLSS.

1440p and 4K:

Acceptable performance in QHD (2560x1440) is only achieved with DLSS/FSR. 4K is impractical, except for older games.


4. Professional Tasks: Not Just Gaming

- Video Editing: In Premiere Pro, rendering a 4K video will take 20–30% longer than on an RTX 3060, but the power is sufficient for 1080p editing.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender 3.6, rendering a mid-level scene will finish in ~15 minutes (compared to ~10 minutes on the RTX 3060).

- CUDA/OpenCL: 2560 CUDA cores accelerate machine learning tasks and scientific calculations, but for complex simulations, it’s better to choose cards with larger memory capacity.


5. Power Consumption and Cooling: Quieter, but Not Weaker

The TDP of the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile is 60–80 W, which allows it to be used in slim gaming laptops (e.g., ASUS Zephyrus G14).

Recommendations:

- Choose models with dual fans and copper heat pipes.

- Avoid ultrabooks with passive cooling—throttling under load is possible.

- Regularly clean the coolers: dust buildup can reduce efficiency by 20–25%.


6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6600M:

- Pros: 8 GB GDDR6, better performance in Vulkan games (Red Dead Redemption 2).

- Cons: Weaker ray tracing support, no equivalent of DLSS.

Intel Arc A730M:

- Pros: Better handling of 1440p, AV1 encoding support.

- Cons: Drivers are less stable, higher heat output.

Conclusion: The RTX 3050 Ti Mobile wins due to DLSS and reflex technologies, but falls short in memory capacity.


7. Practical Tips

- Power Supply: A laptop with the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile requires a 150–180 W adapter.

- Compatibility: The card works with any modern CPU (Intel 12th-14th generation, AMD Ryzen 5000–8000).

- Drivers: Update through GeForce Experience—latest versions are optimized for 2025 games.


8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Support for DLSS and RTX.

- Energy efficiency.

- Affordable price: laptops starting from $800.

Cons:

- Only 4 GB of memory.

- Limited performance in 1440p/4K.


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

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

- Gamers who value smooth gameplay in 1080p and want to try ray tracing.

- Students and freelancers working with video editing and 3D graphics on the go.

- Owners of thin laptops where quiet operation and battery life are crucial.

In 2025, the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile remains relevant: it offers the best price-to-performance ratio in its category. If you aren’t chasing 4K and are willing to make small compromises at ultra settings, this card will be a reliable companion for the next 2–3 years.

Basic

Label Name
NVIDIA
Platform
Mobile
Launch Date
May 2021
Model Name
GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile
Generation
GeForce 30 Mobile
Base Clock
735MHz
Boost Clock
1035MHz
Bus Interface
PCIe 4.0 x16
Transistors
12,000 million
RT Cores
20
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.
80
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.
80
Foundry
Samsung
Process Size
8 nm
Architecture
Ampere

Memory Specifications

Memory Size
4GB
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.
128bit
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.
192.0 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.
33.12 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.
82.80 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.
5.299 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.
82.80 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.
5.193 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.
20
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.
2560
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
6.7
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.
32

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)
Score
5.193 TFLOPS
3DMark Time Spy
Score
5271
Blender
Score
1484
OctaneBench
Score
162

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS
5.128 -1.3%
5.013 -3.5%
3DMark Time Spy
9388 +78.1%
7462 +41.6%
3953 -25%
2758 -47.7%
Blender
5351.01 +260.6%
2640.18 +77.9%
835 -43.7%
403 -72.8%