Kiss goodbye to cheap VRAM, reports say supplies of Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics cards are finally running out

Did you know that Nvidia's RTX 3060 graphics card was still available to buy new? Me neither. But it won't be for much longer, according to reports.

Board Channels (login required, via Videocardz) claims that the last new RTX 3060s will filter through supply channels in December, after which availability of the GPU will end. We first reviewed the RTX 3060 way back in February 2021. So, it's had an exceptionally long run of nearly five years.

It's thought Nvidia stopped producing the GA106 GPU dies upon which the RTX 3060 is based some time in 2024. But it takes a while for those dies to work their way through the system.

"This Nvidia RTX 3060 series has been sold for a long time. Although Nvidia stopped producing this GPU a while ago, board partners still had remaining inventory on hand," Board Channels says.

"Brands such as Colorful, Taiwanese vendors, and Galax mostly cleared their inventory around September or October. After that, only Zotac still had the largest RTX 3060 stock on hand, and it was fully cleared during November. That means genuinely new RTX 3060 cards have now been completely sold through, and from this month the card is said to be officially exiting the market and 'ending its mission,'" Board Channels goes on.

If there's a single reason why the 3060 has remained relevant this long, it's VRAM. It launched with 12 GB and was the first vaguely affordable GPU to be made available with more than 8 GB, albeit an 8 GB version followed later in 2021. Given the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060 that followed were both limited to 8 GB, the RTX 3060 12 GB retains pretty much unique appeal in that respect.

Indeed, on paper the RTX 3060 still compares remarkably well with those later GPUs. The 3060 rocked 3,584 CUDA cores, 112 texture units and 48 render outputs. The current RTX 5070 has 3,840 cores, 120 texture units and 48 render outputs.

What's more, the 5060's memory subsytem has actually regressed. The 3060 12 GB had 192-bit bus. The 5060 is an 8 GB board with a 128-bit bus.

Indeed, in traditional raster rendering terms, it's probably only the fact that the 5060 is quite a bit higher clocked at 2,497 MHz to the 3060's 1,777 MHz that makes it the clearly faster card.

Of course, the newer GPUs have a stronger feature set, too. Nvidia upgraded its ray-tracing units substantially over the two generations that followed the Ampere architecture used by the 3060. And we've had multiple generations of DLSS improvements, including extras like frame generation and ray reconstruction.

However, the RTX 3060 does actually support most of that DLSS trickery, though you do miss out on frame-gen and multi-frame-gen. That just adds to its long term appeal.

It's not clear exactly who has been buying RTX 3060s of late. Several commenters on Reddit put its remarkably resilient popularity down to demand from coding students looking for a cheap card to run small LLM models.

But overall, it's surely no coincidence that the RTX 3060 came with more VRAM than was the norm for an entry-level GPU and has been unusually long-lived. And what with the ongoing memory supply crisis, anyone who has bought a 12 GB RTX 3060 lately is probably feeling pretty good about that decision.

The way things are currently going, who would bet against Nvidia launching a next-gen RTX 6060 in 2027, still with 8 GB and therefore less VRAM that its three-generations-hence progenitor of six years earlier? Ouch.

Best graphics card 2025

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

👉Check out our full graphics card guide👈