I'm building a PC mainly for gaming, video editing, and possibly creating YouTube content. I'm deciding between a cheaper RTX 3060 with 12GB of VRAM and a more expensive RTX 5060 with 8GB. The 3060 offers more memory, but the 5060 is newer, faster, and has more modern features. If the price difference is noticeable, would you still pay extra for the 5060, or is the 3060's extra VRAM and lower cost the better choice? I'm particularly concerned about how 8GB of VRAM will perform in newer games and editing workloads.
3 Answers
The RTX 3060 is worth considering if it is significantly cheaper or if you need the extra VRAM for local AI models, high-resolution textures, mods, or applications that can exceed 8GB. Twelve gigabytes gives it more breathing room, but the card itself is much slower and older. I’d only pick it when the discount is large enough to justify giving up the 5060’s performance and newer features.
The 5060 makes more sense for recording, streaming, and video work because it has newer NVENC features, including AV1 encoding and improved support for modern formats. The 3060 can still edit video perfectly well, but it lacks some of those newer encoding capabilities. For editing, your CPU, storage, and the software you use also matter a lot, so the GPU alone won’t determine performance.
For 1080p gaming, I’d choose the RTX 5060 unless the RTX 3060 is dramatically cheaper. The 5060 is substantially faster, has newer hardware, and should receive useful driver and feature support for longer. Its 8GB of VRAM is a limitation, but lowering one or two demanding settings is usually enough to keep newer games running smoothly. It can also handle some 1440p gaming with sensible settings and upscaling.
The 8GB limit can already show up in some newer 1080p games, so it isn’t completely future-proof. Even so, I’d still take the 5060 over the 3060 if the price gap is reasonable because the performance difference is much larger than the VRAM difference.
For ordinary 1080p gaming, the extra VRAM doesn’t automatically make the 3060 faster. You may have to lower texture settings on the 5060, but stable frame rates are generally more important than maximum texture quality.