Nvidia has now announced another new addition to its popular RTX 30-Series graphics cards in the form of the GeForce RTX 3060. Similar to the 3060 Ti version announced in late 2020, the new RTX 3060 card looks to provide an Ampere-powered experience, but at a cheaper price than the other options currently available in the company’s latest lineup.
The RTX 30-Series made the headlines for multiple reasons throughout 2020. At first, it was the sheer power and performance that attracted attention with benchmarks showing a notable improvement on past generations. However, the attention quickly turned to the availability of the new graphics card with Nvidia seemingly selling out in minutes of release. At the same time, bots and scalpers were reported to have been buying up large quantities of the RTX stock with a view to selling on at an inflated price.
As part of CES 2021, Nvidia has now announced the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. Priced at just $329 in the United States, the RTX 3060 will now assume the role of the cheapest option in the GeForce RTX 30 lineup. Nvidia has yet to specify exactly then the RTX 3060 will go on general sale, but did explain it is launching in late February. As to be expected, the new graphics card should be available through a variety of third-party retailers as well as directly through Nvidia.
How The RTX 3060 Compares
In the announcement, Nvidia explains the RT3060 is arriving as an upgrade to the GTX 1060 from 2016, citing twice the raster performance and ten times the ray tracing performance as examples of the improvements on offer with the 2021 card. When comparing to the more recent models, the RTX 3060 arrives priced at $70 less than the Ti model. In spite of the cheaper price, it does come with 12GB GDDR6 memory (compared to the Ti’s 8GB) and a 1.78 boost clock speed (compared to the Ti’s 1.67). Although, it does come with less CUDA cores than the RTX 3060 Ti.
Overall, with many of the same upgrades available through the RTX 30-Series in general, including improved ray tracing and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), along with more memory, and at a cheaper price, the RTX 3060 looks like a solid option for those in the market for a new graphics card. Likewise, this is likely to be a very useful and natural upgrade for those planning on replacing their GTX 1060 card this year. Of course, that’s all providing that, when the RTX 3060 goes on sale next month, Nvidia doesn’t suffer the same availability issues that have plagued the RTX 30-Series in general.
Source: Nvidia