Nvidia compares RTX 3050 to GTX 1050 on product page graph

GPUs are a bit of a hot topic at the moment given they’re so hard to come by. With the chip shortage and crypto mining gobbling them all up, demand for good GPUs has never been higher. So it’s baffling that companies are using blatantly misleading comparisons when marketing these cards.

On Twitter, Andreas Schilling editor at HardwareLuxx, pointed out some AMD comparison graphs which pit the new entry level AMD Radeon Pro W6400 GPU against a Radeon Pro WX 3200 released in 2019. It’s an odd choice, given the comparisons don’t even make the new card look very good. Two out of the three benchmarks shown simply say comparable, which isn’t what most people want to hear when looking to upgrade.

Never to be outdone, it looks like team green is also serving up odd comparison graphs. In a reply to Schilling’s tweet, a screenshot from Nvidia’s product page for the RTX 3050 shows an even worse example. For some unfathomable reason, this graph compares an RTX 3050 to a GTX 1650 and GTX 1050. I can hear my brain screaming when I look at it, the 1050 came out in 2016. What is it even doing there? Two of the tests are games with RTX On enabled which I’m sure works brilliantly on a nice old GTX card. As I’d imagine does the DLSS quality mode. I can’t think of any valid reasons to use those cards to compare against a 3050 other than to inflate how powerful it appears.

AMD did a similar thing to make the recently released Radeon RX 6500 XT look better, comparing that to a GTX 1650, as well as an RX 570. If a 2022 GPU wasn't beating a similarly priced card from 2016 or 2017 then we're all in trouble, though I'd hope that was a given at this point and didn't need pointing out.

It all makes AMD’s workstation comparison almost make sense. At least it’s hard to accuse the red team of trying to make a card look more powerful than it is in these comparisons. These cards are also a bit more niche, so a comparison like that doesn’t seem quite as purposefully odd.

Nvidia’s RTX 3050 is new to the desktop market after being found in gaming laptops for a while. It’s not likely to be a bad card, but these comparisons are just a bit odd. The budget Ampere card was recently revealed to have a price tag of $249 USD, which sounds pretty good especially in the current market and is set to be available by the end of January. Hopefully we’ll actually see stock of these so we can do some benchmarks of our own and compare them to more relevant GPUs.