NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Launches February 25 At $329 USD
We first had official confirmation of the RTX 3060 (non-Ti) from NVIDIA at their RTX Game On event from virtual CES 2021. We now have an official press release for this upcoming GPU, as well as confirmation of the $329 USD price and a release date: February 25. Oh, and it’s a partner-only launch, so no Founders Edition card.
The new GPU will have significantly more memory than the previous entry in the 3060 family with 12GB of GDDR6, compared to 8GB with the RTX 3060 Ti. This makes more sense when the 192-bit memory interface is taken into account (the RTX 3060 Ti has a 256-bit bus), as NVIDIA’s options were essentially to release the card with 6GB, or 12GB. I’m sure buyers will be happy for the larger number.
From the above screenshot (an excerpt of the specs available here) we see a CUDA core count of 3584, which would place the SM count at 28. Base Clock is slightly lower than the RTX 3060 Ti at 1.32 GHz (vs. 1.41 GHz), but Boost Clock is higher than the Ti – 1.78 GHz vs. 1.67 GHz.
NVIDIA lists GPU power at 13 shader TFLOPs, 25 RT (ray tracing) TFLOPs, and 101 tensor TFLOPs for DLSS. And those figures, coupled with the 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, make the RTX 3060 a very big upgrade for people still on the venerable GTX 1060, which is the product NVIDIA is targeting in their marketing for this new GPU as they remind us that the GTX 1060 has been “long at the top of the GPU gaming charts since its introduction in 2016”.
“With newer gaming titles come bigger worlds with cinematic graphics and real-time ray tracing — these are gaming workloads that only RTX-powered platforms are suited to handle. The GeForce RTX 3060 has twice the raster performance and 10x the ray-tracing performance of the GTX 1060, making it a formidable upgrade opportunity and the foundation of a gaming PC platform powerful enough to handle cutting-edge titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Fortnite with RTX On at 60 frames per second.”
All of this looks very good, though enthusiasm for this new GPU from prospective buyers will hinge on availability. At least having more members of the RTX 30 Series family could theoretically spell better overall availability, but who knows.
One more area of technical interest: this will not be another GA104 product like the RTX 3070 and 3060 Ti before it (it’s listed as GA106 over at AnandTech and at everyone’s favorite source for news about video cards with a Z), so we are not looking at a “cut down” variant of an existing GPU.
Regardless, availability is all speculative until the cards hit the shelves – virtually or physically. Maybe I’ll actually be able to walk into my local Best Buy and snag one! (Not all of us are lucky enough to live close to a Microcenter, BRETT.)
