For those who require portability for their gaming setup, or even just don’t have the space for a dedicated gaming PC tower, an RTX 3050 Ti gaming laptop is one of many options that are available to you.
This graphics card provides incredibly good value for money and — until NVIDIA eventually unveils a 4050 Ti — is the best budget option available for those not wanting to take the step into high-end graphics cards.
Let’s take a look at this graphics card in detail, and what RTX 3050 Ti gaming laptops are a great choice for your new setup — whether gaming or for content creation.
RTX 3050 Ti for Gaming
The RTX 3050 Ti is a great budget option for gamers who aren’t looking to splash out huge amounts of money for a top-end GPU.
While you won’t find the power level of an RTX 3080 here, this GPU is great for those who want to play games that don’t necessarily require the highest amount of graphical quality as part of its core experience.
This is especially useful for a lot of eSports and competitive gaming titles, as these games are essentially optimised to ensure that anybody can run them on any graphics card, and are a lot more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive at points.
These games — titles such as League of Legends and VALORANT — are incredibly popular and so the games are designed for a wide range of people with varied setups. However, a card such as the 3050Ti is also better than another, worse GPU.
After all, even if you don’t need a lot of graphical capability, you’ll still need at least a decent GPU to ensure that you can run the game in a stable manner while not experiencing frame drops or severe visibility issues. You typically will run the game at a lower resolution (1080p for most systems, 1440p at a stretch) to ensure maximum FPS performance — even pro players do this while having access to the best graphics cards.
The 3050 Ti is perfect for this — it’s not the best graphics card available, but for those that are looking to just play eSports titles and competitive games, the value provided by the 3050 Ti is second to none.
In fact, a 3050 Ti with an i7 can easily run both League of Legends and VALORANT at over 200FPS on Ultra settings, due to the game being heavily CPU based.
For newer competitive games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, this GPU doesn’t reach the same heights of 200FPS. However, it can still run the game consistently over 60FPS at 1080 — which is pretty good, considering how budget-conscious this graphics card is.
If you want to play competitive racing simulators and other racing games, this GPU is also a great budget option. In Assetto Corsa Competizione, a 3050 Ti will grant you a stable 60FPS at 1080p Epic settings when using an i5 processor, let alone an i7 like the prior games!
Even if you do want to play a AAA title, this GPU doesn’t necessarily close off that option for you either. While you won’t get the same amazing quality as a high-end GPU, if you’re only looking to play these large-scale games sporadically, this GPU is definitely a great option.
It can handle Elden Ring at 1080p Ultra settings and still have a consistent 40+ FPS — which may not seem great at first. However, you can turn the quality down to increase FPS however much you’d like. Considering that this is a highly graphical AAA game, it’s a good indication of how flexible this budget GPU is.
RTX 3050 Ti for Creators
An RTX 3050 Ti laptop is a great solution for budget-conscious creators who need extra portability and versatility from their setup. Again, this GPU isn’t the most powerful on the market, but it still gets the job done really well, and provides a lot of value!
Video editors can utilise this GPU in tools such as Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve and still have great rendering capabilities — while slower than with a better graphics card, this GPU is still able to render well and will not set you back at all.
For streamers, this GPU is great as it’s a budget-friendly way to get access to the 5th Generation NVENC encoder for H.264 and H.265. This will improve the quality of your streams immensely and help you keep up with the ever-evolving digital video landscape.
What are my best options for an RTX 3050 Ti Laptop?
Top pick: Chillblast Phantom 16" i7 32GB 2TB GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Gaming Laptop