NVIDIA has announced the GeForce RTX 3060, priced at US$329
NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 will be the most affordable RTX 30 Series card yet
NVIDIA has announced its newest member of the RTX 30 Series family - the GeForce RTX 3060. Priced at US$329, the card is designed to replace the ageing Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1060 cards. This comes hot on the heels of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti launch last month, which I've reviewed here.
What's interesting here is that the RTX 3060 will have 12GB of GDDR6 of memory, as compared to 8GB of the same memory in the 3060 Ti and 10GB of GDDR6X in the flagship RTX 3080. This is likely to boost the longevity and long-term performance of the card, as NVIDIA is particularly pitching them as an upgrade for 60-tier, budget-sensitive gamers, from two generations or further back - owners of the aforementioned GTX 1060 cards.
Now, along with the significant feature differences afforded by two generations of improvements such as RT and Tensor cores and HDMI 2.1 ports – there should also be a sizable performance advantage for the newer cards. If performances will be similar to what we have seen from our earlier Ampere cards, then it's safe to assume that the RTX 3060 should have a roughly two times performance gain over the GTX 1060.
Though for NVIDIA’s own figures they’ve opted to focus in part on features, only posting a couple of benchmark results without DLSS/RT enabled. Still, the roughly 2x performance gain is right around what we’d expect over the GTX 1060, given what we’ve seen from the earlier Ampere cards.
The GeForce RTX 3060 will be available worldwide from late February onwards. NVIDIA will not be shipping a Founders Edition of the card this time, so it will be the first Ampere card that will only be available via NVIDIA's AIB partners.
I just hope there will be enough stocks by then.