The previously rumored fresh spin on the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is really happening, with Asus revealing its refreshed take on the popular Ampere GPU.
As VideoCardz (opens in new tab) spotted, Asus has unveiled a pair of new TUF GDDR6X models of its RTX 3060 Ti graphics card, one of which is the base card, and another is the OC Edition.
The only difference compared to the existing TUF RTX 3060 Ti boards is that the 8GB of VRAM is faster. Instead of 14Gbps GDDR6 video RAM, the refreshed cards use 19Gbps GDDR6X memory, upping the overall memory bandwidth substantially from 448GB/s to 608GB/s.
That is the only change here, and otherwise the CUDA Core count, clocks, and all other specs remain the same.
VideoCardz points out that pepping up the memory bandwidth like so results in an increase of around 7% to 10% better performance based on 3DMark scores.
Analysis: Will that VRAM make all that much difference in reality?
Of course, synthetic benchmarks are a useful indicator, but what we really want to see is how much difference the faster VRAM makes to real-world gaming (across the usual variety of titles to get some overall perspective as to the actual impact on boosting frame rates).
Clearly, there will be some performance uplift, but it could be the case that it’s a relatively minor boost. Still, depending on pricing, and exactly how much difference the new GDDR6X RAM makes – which the jury is still out on, of course – this new spin on the RTX 3060 Ti might be a compelling buy. And we should bear in mind that in recent times, the vanilla 3060 Ti has (finally) started to witness some chunky drops in its price.
That said, with Nvidia pursuing a ‘layered’ launch strategy – rolling out next-gen RTX 4000 graphics cards at a slow pace (and indeed reversing course with one of them, ‘unlaunching’ it) – it remains to be seen when mid-range Lovelace will turn up, with rumors suggesting it may not be for some time yet. (Remember, Nvidia purportedly has quite the hefty amount of RTX 3000 inventory to clear.)
And that being the case, we could be stuck with the RTX 3060 and the Ti variant (including this new version of the latter, of course) for some time yet, so pricing could become a bit less likely to drop, and perhaps level out as a result, at least for the time being.