Rtx 3060 graphics card upgrade#
Rtx 3060 graphics card series#

This is standard fare for 60-tier cards, and does come with some trade-offs, mainly in terms of memory capacity. On the memory side of matters, GA106 introduces a smaller 192-bit memory bus, which is comprised of six 32-bit memory controllers. Meanwhile the impact to ROP performance remains to be seen. On paper, this means the RTX 3060 will offer around 80% of the RTX 3060 Ti’s shader and texture performance, with the card’s relatively high boost clock helping to make up for the overall lack of SMs. The card itself will ship with a base clockspeed of 1.32GHz, and a rated boost clock of 1.78GHz. Meanwhile, as NVIDIA has bound the number of ROPs to the SMs (or rather, the GPCs that encompass them), it’s not clear right now how many ROPs the card will offer, but 64 or a good fraction thereof is a good bet at this point. Everything else in Ampere should be in proportion to NVIDIA’s usual layout, so this means there will also be 112 TMUs, 112 tensor cores, and 28 RT cores. In any case, the RTX 3060 as it’s shipping will come with 28 SMs enabled, for a total of 3584 FP32 CUDA cores. It does not appear that this is a fully-enabled GA106 part – the RTX 3060 Laptop GPU offers slightly better specs – but for the moment we don’t know what a fully-enabled GA106 might look like. But at a high level, NVIDIA is confirming that the GeForce RTX 3060 is based on a new NVIDIA GPU, which following their’s usual product cascade is GA106. NVIDIA GeForce Specification ComparisonĪt this point I’m still chasing down more detailed product specifications from NVIDIA, as the press material they’ve published so far isn’t entirely comprehensive.

And with that comes the need to please both performance and budget enthusiasts, a tall order for a card that is set to start at $329. So for the moment, at least, the RTX 3060 is taking the mantle as the true successor to NVIDIA’s 60-tier of video cards. While we don’t have any direct visibility into what comes after the RTX 3060, the smaller die sizes afforded by Samsung’s 8nm process mean that NVIDIA isn’t facing the same pressure to bifurcate.

Rtx 3060 graphics card series#

Alternative, the GTX 1660 series of cards offered much better pricing for only a small drop in performance, but these cards lacked the hardware RTX features that are now becoming a baseline as part of the DirectX 12 Ultimate specification.Īs a result, NVIDIA is undertaking a reintegration of sorts with its GeForce lineup. At $349 we had the RTX 2060, which was a decent card, but not especially impressive on a price/performance basis. Owing in large part to the significant die space requirements for NVIDIA’s RTX family of features – ray tracing, tensor cores, etc – NVIDIA bifurcated their lineup at the 60 level. The release of the RTX 3060 comes on the heels of what was a fragmented product lineup in the last generation.

Rtx 3060 graphics card upgrade#

It’ll be the cheapest that NVIDIA has ever launched an RTX series card, and it will be the card that they hope will entice owners of GTX 1060 series cards, one of NVIDIA’s most successful card series of all times, to finally upgrade to an RTX card. Though the company already launched the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti last month – using a cut-down GA104 GPU – the RTX 3060 is the real McCoy in terms of being a 60-tier card. Once it’s launched next month, the GeForce RTX 3060 will mark the next step in the progression of NVIDIA’s Ampere-based desktop cards. And with prices set to start at $329, at launch the RTX 3060 will become the cheapest RTX card that NVIDIA has ever offered. Long the backbone of NVIDIA’s desktop sales in North America and elsewhere, the 60-tier cards typically strike a solid balance between price and performance. Reflected the continued progression of the Ampere architecture into smaller and cheaper video cards as NVIDIA continues its product stack rollout, the RTX 3060 marks the introduction of Ampere into their popular mainstream-enthusiast 60-series video card tier.

Alongside today’s CES-centric announcement of their new GeForce RTX 30 series parts for laptops, NVIDIA also offered an in-depth reveal of their next desktop graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3060.