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The RTX 30-series is about to get a little more affordable. Nvidia announced today the RTX 3060 graphics card, which will come equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 memory and be available from late February—all for $329.
The RTX 3060 should make for a decent upgrade for anyone still rocking a 10-series card, as Nvidia is keen to mention, with the card offering the latest Ampere architecture and all the good stuff that comes with it.
That's 13 shader TFLOPS, 25 RT TFLOPS and 101 Tensor TFLOPs of raw performance, if that means much to you. It's pretty easy to guess where this GPU will fall in the overall performance-scape of the 30-series, just head to our RTX 3060 Ti review and work backwards from there. But that large memory buffer will have the final say in some benchmarks.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 Ti |
|---|---|---|
| CUDA Cores | 3,584 | 4,864 |
| Boost Clock (GHz) | 1.78 | 1.67 |
| Base Clock (GHz) | 1.32 | 1.41 |
| Memory | 12 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus | 192-bit | 256-bit |
| Price | $329 | $399 |
| Availability | Late February, 2021 | December, 2020 |
The card has been pretty heavily rumoured for a while now, confounding everyone with its 12GB GDDR6 memory. That's higher capacity than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, which both come with 8GB of GDDR6, albeit on a slimmer 192-bit memory bus. It's even greater capacity than the RTX 3080 at 10GB, but the high-end card comes with faster GDDR6X memory and overall much improved memory bandwidth.
The shift to 12GB is often seen as a response to the higher memory capacities of AMD's RX 6000-series, but you'll never hear Nvidia say it.
Whatever the reason for the generous helping of VRAM, the RTX 3060 12GB sure sounds like a great gaming card at a more affordable price than we've currently seen out of Ampere. Let's hope there are plenty available when they launch next month, because high demand is likely an understatement for what's to come.
