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12GB RTX 3060 beats newer cards in fresh tests
Fresh tests show the 12GB RTX 3060 closing in on the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, and beating both at 4K.
Image: ITzine
The 12GB GeForce RTX 3060 is showing surprising staying power. In a fresh comparison by 3DCenter, Nvidia’s older card outperformed the newer GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 in several scenarios, particularly at higher resolutions.
The comparison combines game tests from 2023 with new measurements from PC Games Hardware taken in 2026. The RTX 3060 12GB was set as the baseline at 100%, with the other cards measured against it in newer games.
RTX 3060 narrows the gap in Full HD
The newer cards still lead in Full HD, but their advantage has shrunk:
- GeForce RTX 4060: its lead over the RTX 3060 fell from 23.5% to 18.8%.
- Radeon RX 7600: its lead dropped from 20.7% to 11.8%.
At 1440p, the difference became almost negligible. At 4K, both 8GB cards fell behind the RTX 3060 with its larger memory capacity. The RTX 4060 reached just 97.2% of the RTX 3060's performance, while the RX 7600 managed 94.9%.
The result is especially notable because much of the mainstream graphics-card market has shifted to 8GB of VRAM. The RTX 4060, RX 7600, and many similarly priced models launched with that capacity, even as games released in 2025 and 2026 increasingly began to exceed it at high settings in 1080p.
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According to the study’s authors, the change is not the result of Ampere drivers suddenly improving. The issue is increasingly demanding games: as texture and buffer requirements rise, limited video memory becomes a larger constraint, especially at higher resolutions.
That helps explain why the RTX 3060 can look stronger than the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 at 1440p and 4K. The fact that the considerably faster GeForce RTX 4070 increased its lead over the RTX 3060 points to a memory-capacity problem rather than a general weakness across Nvidia’s newer lineup.
The RTX 3060 also remains widely available on the used market. It sold in large volumes and became one of Nvidia’s most common cards of its generation, giving buyers a choice between a newer 8GB model and an older card whose extra VRAM may prove more useful in some games.
As developers raise demands for textures and buffers, performance differences will depend on more than GPU cores and clock speeds. The RTX 3060's 12GB could help it remain viable longer than its age suggests, particularly for Full HD gaming with a path to 1440p.
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via ITzine
