Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a $329 graphics card AMD can’t beat

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a $329 graphics card AMD can't beat

(Prototype credit: Nvidia)

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti made its debut simply a calendar month ago, but Nvidia's not finished with graphics cards. At CES 2021, Nvidia announced its new $329 GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.

Nvidia is banking on this new card to appeal to anyone waiting to upgrade their cards without having to spend big. This graphics card is $70 cheaper than the RTX 3060 Ti and over $150 less than the GeForce RTX 3070, all the same still promises serious gaming functioning.

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The GeForce RTX 3060, which appears to be a viable substitute for older GTX 1060 Pascal cards, features specs even PC users with enviable setups might detect themselves greenish with green-eyed over. The menu will offering 12GB of GDDR6 retentivity, and is said to evangelize a dramatic improvement with both ray tracing and raster performance.

Compared to the GTX 1060, the RTX 3060 has twice the raster performance and 10x the ray-tracing performance. And Nvidia touted it equally 1.3x every bit powerful as a PS5.

Information technology will include support for all of Nvidia'southward ray tracing and DLSS features, the latter of which allows users to harness the power of neural networks to help sharpen games that run at lower resolutions. That mode, y'all could be looking at much crisper games cheers to prototype reconstruction that offers native 4K in some situations, or amend.

Additionally, you can expect 13 shader-TFLOPs, 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing, 101 tensor-TFLOPs (for Nvidia's DLSS abilities), and a 194-flake memory interface.

Though there aren't currently whatsoever benchmarks to examination the RTX 3060's specs against the other cards in the latest Nvidia line, information technology's safe to say this particular model is a tempting i.

And that'll be a danger to AMD, which currently doesn't have an RDNA two - its latest GPU compages - graphics bill of fare priced beneath the $500 mark. That leaves the mainstream PC gaming loonshit pretty much open to Nvidia. Nosotros'd expect AMD to retort with new, more budget-oriented Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards before too long; we predict effectually spring fourth dimension.

Nvidia likewise confirmed a variety of PC makers are on lath to feature the RTX 3060 in their systems, including ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, and Zotac. With multiple companies lined upwards for the graphics carte du jour, one might presume at that place won't be supply problems equally bad as the ones prospective buyers have experienced over the last few months with Nvidia'southward other models.

If yous're looking to beat the scalpers that will virtually undoubtedly plague the RTX 3060's launch, notwithstanding, Nvidia plans to release the card in belatedly February. We'll await to go along you abreast of stock levels and where to buy the RTX 3060 closer to the release date. And we'd not be surprised to meet machines sporting the GeForce RTX 3060 pop up in our best gaming PCs list before besides long.

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over 13 years for publications including Tom'south Guide, MTV, Rolling Stone, CNN, Popular Science, Playboy, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, and more. She'due south too appeared as a panelist at video game conventions like PAX E and PAX West and has coordinated social media for companies like CNET. When she's not writing or gaming, she'due south looking for the next great visual novel in the vein of Saya no Uta. You can follow her on Twitter @MolotovCupcake.