Nvidia is launching the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU for $329. This is its most affordable RTX 30-series card so far, and the company is aiming it squarely at the huge audience that is still using the megapopular GTX 1060.
Here are the basic specifications:
- 13 shader-TFLOPs
- 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing
- 101 tensor-TFLOPs to power Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)
- 192-bit memory interface
- 12GB of GDDR6 memory
“There’s unstoppable momentum behind ray tracing, which has quickly redefined the new standard of gaming,” Nvidia GeForce marketing boss Matt Wuebbling said. “The Nvidia Ampere architecture has been our fastest-selling ever, and the RTX 3060 brings the strengths of the RTX 30 Series to millions more gamers everywhere.”
Nvidia wants GTX 1060 owners to upgrade to RTX 3060
Nvidia notes that the GTX 1060 is the most popular card on Valve’s Steam hardware survey — and it has been since 2016. That is a lot of enthusiasts who are likely getting ready to upgrade and specifically chose to skip the RTX 20-series generation. To convince those people that now is the time to buy a new GPU, Nvidia is hyping up both the RTX 3060’s traditional rasterization performance and its ray-tracing capabilities.
According to Nvidia, the 3060 has twice the rasterization performance of the GTX 1060. That is a big upgrade when it comes to running most games. This should ensure the 3060 is great for 1080p and even 1440p resolutions — especially with that 12GB of GDDR6 memory. But the RTX 3060 is also a competent ray-tracing solution.
Where the GTX 1060 can barely run ray-tracing games at double-digit framerates, the RTX 3060 has 10-times the performance in the same tasks.
The RTX 3060 also includes support for Resizable BAR, which is a feature that enables a PC system to share video RAM with the CPU. AMD is already doing this, and Nvidia claims similar performance gains of around 10%.
The RTX 3060 launches in late February.
