Anyone who is paying attention to the graphics card market should know that there is a surprising news recently. The GeForce RTX 3060 12GB, which has been launched for more than five years, is back. This graphics card was first launched in February 2021, with an official recommended price of US$329. Now it is back on the shelves in many countries, and the price is also US$329.99. Many people may think this is too expensive when they see this? After all, they are already 5 years old.
However, foreign media 3DCenter recently compiled PC Games Hardware’s game tests in 2023 and 2026, and found an interesting phenomenon: Although the RTX 3060 12GB is relatively old, the performance gap between it and the two new 8GB cards, RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600, is narrowing. After the resolution reached 4K, the RTX 3060 even surpassed these two new cards.
Image source: VideoCardz
RTX 3060 12GB gets better as it gets older? Three-year performance trends show that 4K surpasses RTX 4060 and RX 7600
According to VideoCardz, this data compares PC Games Hardware Gaming tests done when the RTX 4060 becomes available in 2023, and results measured in 2026 using newer games. 3DCenter set the RTX 3060 12GB at 100% at each resolution and looked at how the position of other cards relative to it had changed over the three years.
In the 1080p test, the relative performance of the RTX 4060 in 2023 was 123.5%, which is about 23.5% ahead of the RTX 3060; in 2026, it was only 118.8%, and the lead narrowed to 18.8%. The change for the Radeon RX 7600 is even more pronounced, falling from 120.7% in 2023 to 111.8% in 2026, with the lead narrowing from 20.7% to 11.8%.
Even for 1080p, which is less likely to hit the upper limit of VRAM capacity, the lead of the two new 8GB graphics cards has begun to disappear. This means that the RTX 3060 suddenly gains more performance, but that games in 2026 will have higher demands on display memory for textures, scenes, and various graphics data than in 2023.
After 8GB becomes the limit, even the higher GPU computing performance cannot be fully utilized.
Once the resolution is increased to 1440p, the gap shrinks even more quickly. RTX 4060 still has 119.4% in 2023, leading RTX 3060 by about 19.4%; in 2026, it will only have 108.5%, and the lead drops to single digits of 8.5%. The RX 7600 also dropped from 117.3% to 105.0%, leaving only 5% of its original 17.3% advantage.
The real reversal of rankings occurs in the 4K test. The relative performance of the RTX 4060 in 2023 was 114.8%, which was still about 14.8% ahead of the RTX 3060 at that time, but dropped to 97.2% in 2026, which is 2.8% lower than the RTX 3060 set at 100%. The RX 7600 also dropped from 107.0% to 94.9%, from leading by 7% to falling behind by 5.1%.
In other words, in this batch of 2026 4K game tests, the relative performance of RTX 3060 12GB has indeed exceeded that of RTX 4060 and RX 7600. This is the most interesting part of the entire data. The computing architecture of the two new graphics cards is more advanced and the performance is significantly faster. However, because they only have 8GB of display memory, the original leading advantage disappears little by little when encountering new games and high-resolution textures.
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Image source: PALIT
Seeing this, some people may think that it is only because NVIDIA’s drivers have continued to optimize for the Ampere architecture in recent years that the relative performance of the RTX 3060 has improved? 3DCenter also ran a comparison using an RTX 4070, also equipped with 12GB of display memory, and the results did not support this statement.
Finally, it should be noted that this comparison is not a strict experiment on the same computer, the same set of drivers and the same batch of games. The game combinations, game versions, drivers and test platforms in 2023 and 2026 may be different. Therefore, it cannot be directly said that the 4K game performance of the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 is really worse than the RTX 3060.
Source: KOCPC Chinese