Despite the COVID-19 epidemic ravaging the world right now, 2020 has been an exciting year for fans of PC technology. Aside from the fact that Intel is getting ready to launch its new Rocket Lake processors, and that AMD has surprised people with its new Ryzen 5000 processors and video cards (which are actually beating Intel in gaming benchmarks now), technology company Nvidia has some surprises in stores for gamers too.
As those in tune with events know, Nvidia introduced a new line of graphics cards earlier this year. These have been selling like hot cakes, while the likes of the GeForce RTX 3070 looked like a good upgrade for those who are still running older cards such as the GeForce GTX 970.
But there could be more options for those looking to upgrade their PC in the near future, as Nvidia is now gearing up to release new variants of its GeForce RTX series 30 range in early 2021 according to a recent report on videocardz.com (via wccftech.com).
Aside from the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (which is likely coming in early December) there’s also the rumored GeForce RTX 3060 in the pipeline. What’s interesting is the rumored specs of this card, more specifically, the amount of memory the RTX 3060 will ship with. This is because according to the VideoCardz report, there will be a variant of the card coming with 12 GB of memory (this rumor originally popped up on MyDrivers and has since been confirmed by VideoCardz).
This is more than what the RTX 3060 Ti is supposedly shipping with (8 GB), and seems odd taking into account that the RTX 3060 is a less capable card than the Ti and has a narrower memory bus (192 bit) than its sibling the RTX 3060 Ti, which has a 256-bit memory bus. The RTX 3060 shipping with 12 GB would also put it ahead in terms of memory capacity of the much more powerful GeForce RTX 3080, which comes with 10 GB.
So if this rumor is proven true and there’s a 12 GB variant of the RTX 3060, this is likely a marketing trick on the part of Nvidia. Equipping a less powerful graphics card with an eye-catching amount of memory in order to drive sales is something the US company has done before, and Nvidia appears to be repeating the trick this time with the RTX 3060.
Nonetheless, the card could still be a worthy successor to Nvidia’s popular GeForce GTX 1060 card. The GeForce RTX 3060 is expected to be priced at $299 US dollars according to wccftech.com with performance that could be similar to that of a GeForce RTX 2080, which could make it a great deal in January 2021, the rumored launch month for the card.
Also rumored to be hitting shelves early next year are the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti and the GeForce RTX 3050.
The RTX 3050 is a lower-end part, boasting less CUDA cores (parallel processors which take care of graphics calculations) than its bigger brother the RTX 3050 Ti and the GeForce RTX 3060.
The RTX 3050 is equipped with 2,304 CUDA cores, while the RTX 3050 Ti features 3,584 according to VideoCardz (these rumored RTX 3050 specs first popped up on Twitter via well-known leaker kopite7kimi). It’s only got a 128-bit memory bus vs the 192-bit memory bus of the other two cards as well, so it’s performance could be lacking.
Being an RTX card, though, it still supports ray tracing, and some people online are expecting this budget card to offer similar performance to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 card as TechRadar points out. This means it could be a good budget buy come next year all the same. The card will be offered in the sub $200 US dollars bracket according to VideoCardz.
As for Nvidia getting ready to launch all of these cards, this definitely has to do with AMD’s recent introduction of its new Radeon RX 6000 line, which according to AMD’s own benchmarks will offer some serious competition to Nvidia’s top of the line RTX series 30 cards.
The good thing is obviously that consumers stand to benefit from the war between Nvidia and AMD in the graphics card market, where Nvidia still has a commanding position. But given that a flurry of new graphics could be coming next year, there will surely be some good video card bargains for PC enthusiasts and more casual users looking to upgrade their PC to pick up next year, that’s for sure.
GeForce series 30 graphics cards (Nvidia Corporation)