Published on – 12-Jan-2021
Nvidia has today launched the most anticipated graphics card (RTX 3060). Many gamers are looking forward to buying it.
As per Nvidia’s press release, the Graphics card will go on sale starting 25th Feb 2021 in the US and in other countries (including India).
However, the supply is going to be low and scalpers and miners are going to buy these before gamers can get their hands on any of them.
It is the 5th graphics card based on the Ampere architecture. Last, they launched the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti.
Nvidia RTX 3060 Price and Availability
The new Nvidia RTX 3060 costs $329 in the US, and in India, the official price will be around Rs. 29,000. This is the minimum price for the graphics card, considering the shortage of Nvidia GPUs, we can expect the retail price to be much higher.
The Nvidia RTX 3060 comes with Nvidia DLSS and Ray tracing features, similar to the expensive cards in the portfolio.
Also, Nvidia has cut the hash rate for the RTX 3060 to 50% to discourage miners from buying these. These cards will be 50% slower at mining and will not be a financially good choice for miners.
Nvidia in a statement said, “There’s unstoppable momentum behind ray tracing, which has quickly redefined the new standard of gaming,” said Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “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 seems to be upbeat with the success of RTX 3080 and the RTX 3070 that offers a significant boost in performance and makes 4K gaming a delight.
The RTX 3060 is ideal for playing games at either Quad-HD resolution or on a high refresh rate FHD monitor.
Notably, the Nvidia RTX 3060Ti was 35% to 50% faster than the RTX 2060 Super.
Based on the early numbers the RTX 3060 is about 10% faster than the RTX 2060 Super. There is a big performance gap between the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3060.
The Ti version is about 30% faster than the RTX 3060 in most gaming titles.
Specifications for Nvidia RTX 3060
The RTX 3060 comes with 13 shader TFLOPS and with 25 RT TFLOPS for Ray Tracing. The graphics card offers 101 tensor TFLOPS to power Nvidia DLSS.
Furthermore, it has a 192 bit Memory bus-width interface and also has 12GB of GDDR6 Memory. This is a big upgrade considering the RTX 3060 Ti and even the RTX 3070 both come with only 8 Gigs of VRAM.
Don’t get fooled by the additional VRAM. The GPU on the 3060Ti is far better and will offer much better performance than the RTX 3060.
Another noticeable difference is that the RTX 3060 Ti comes with a 256-bit memory bus-width whereas the RTX 3060 has a 192-bit memory bus width.
Considering that Nvidia has actually reduced the memory bandwidth on the RTX 3060 there will be some impact on the performance.
The major reason for the 12 Gig VRAM is that AMD is planning to have 12 Gigs VRAM on the RX 6700 that is scheduled to launch in April or May 2021.
Nvidia has not shared the core or boost clock frequencies of the new Graphics card at the moment.
Top Features – Nvidia RTX 3060
With the new RTX 3000 series of graphics cards, Nvidia is not only pushing the raw frame rates but also is looking to enhance the overall gaming experience.
Ray Tracing and DLSS enable higher shader details, shadows, and ambient lighting to make the game graphics more realistic.
Slowly lots of game developers are boarding the bus and enabling support for RTX and DLSS in modern titles to take full advantage of the hardware.
What’s more the Tensor Cores offer AI processing and enable features like – One-Click Overclocking to make it easy for gamers to squeeze the last bit of gaming performance from their rigs.
Nvidia DLSS uses AI to upscale the images (frames) to make them look clearer and sharper. Overall the company is not looking to just push higher frame rates but also to make the experience richer for gamers and streamers by offering additional features.
Pricing
Aforementioned, the Nvidia RTX 3060 will cost $329 in the US and in India, the official price will be close to Rs. 30,000 including the 18% GST.
Different Graphics Card manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI will come up with the RTX 3060 versions that can cost Rs. 40,000 or even more at the launch.
It is unlikely that Nvidia will launch a Founder’s Edition version of the RTX 3060.
On Amazon, the RTX 3060 Ti currently retails for Rs. 58,000 whereas the MRP by Nvidia is close to Rs. 36,000.
The prices for Nvidia Graphics cards and the new AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors are insanely high at the moment due to supply shortages and we hope things get better in the coming weeks.
Let’s hope things become better in 2021!
Source – Nvidia Press Release and The Verge – RTX3060
