Those of you who have been following the saga of my potato PC will be familiar with my previous stubbornness at running TSW at 4K on a GTX1650 4Gb GPU and not surprisingly getting mediocre results. The original plan had been to replace the PC later this year, however the combination of current hardware prices (extortionate) and Microsoft extending Windows 10 support for security updates to October 2027 caused a rethink. So instead I decided to invest in a RTX3050 6Gb to replace the 1650. Still a bit outrageous price wise, £20 more than this time last year whereas in a normal hardware market by now they should have dropped to the @£100 mark. A 3050 is the most my PSU could handle and with a PCI 3.0 motherboard no point in fitting anything stronger that’s technically PCI 4.0. Anyhow swapped in yesterday evening, no issues just the usual faff trying to get tiny screws in small holes with sausage fingers. Drivers installed, reboot and straight into TSW6. Loaded up a saved run on WCML Over Shap and immediately impressed. With the 1650, frame rate topped out at around 21 FPS, the 3050 was making 30 FPS with just the occasional slight drop and of course the usual stutter which is down to tile loading, or so we are told. Might be wishful thinking but it looks sharper and cleaner too. Also bear in mind this is the first run, when the shaders are recompiling after the GPU and driver update. Will be interesting to see how other performance heavy routes fare, but suffice to say this is much better than I expected having read elsewhere the 3050 is not a huge gain over the 1650. Next I fired up SimRail as this is one of the few games I have that supports DLSS. Initially ran with the default FSR and everything much smoother and more fluid. Switched to DLSS and still smooth, but noticed a watery effect on certain parts of the display, mainly on the edge around the cab side windows. That could be the 3050 only offers very basic DLSS or the implementation in SimRail needs more work. Tested a few other games, ETS2 and ATS noticeably smoother and I will start seeing if I turn up some settings what happens. Snowrunner likewise on a quick five minute test. Yet to look at The Bus or Roadcraft. So all in all, a worthwhile medium term investment to prolong the potato a little longer. Back on topic to TSW, I’m guessing having a RTX card now means I can pick the more advanced version of the God/Environment mod if I do desire. The only caveat so far is the 3050 seems a bit noisier fan wise and quicker to spool up than the 1650 was, but that could be the fact the computer room is around 27C in the evening in the current weather. In conclusion, if your motherboard and PSU can take it and you’re looking to squeeze another year or two out of the old PC, worth going for a 3050 (or the AMD equivalent which I think is a 6600, but I don’t do AMD).
https://www.techspot.com/review/2403-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3050/ Don't know where you are reading to think there wouldn't be huge gains, but as you can see from a trusted source and your own experience there actually is.
Man, I'm really glad I built my new PC to replace my 12 year old one last summer, shortly before all that price-madness started.
This 3050 I believe is 70 watts which is within the capacity of my 450w PSU. Anything more demanding would have been pushing it... Also anything more than a 3050 is likely to be bottlenecked by the rest of the system which is an I7 4770 CPU.
450W PSU can run 3060Ti if it's not a noname. I have 500W SeaSonic for 4060Ti and consumption from the wall does not exceed 300W in heavy games. The PSU produces approximately 260-270 W of the declared 500. These recommendations from videocard manufacturers are made with a huge reserve in case you have a top-end processor on a top-end motherboard with almost unlimited PL1(Power Limit for CPU). OK. That's make sense.
Well at the end of the day, it's in there and working well which is the main thing. I could swear the vehicles in Snowrunner move quicker with a smoother frame rate!
