During its CES 2021 keynote, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a mid-range graphics card designed to get ray traced gaming to every PC gamer.
The announcement, presented by Nvidia’s Jeff Fisher, gave some details about the new GPU. Claiming twice the raster performance of the GTX 1060, and 10 times the ray tracing performance – which shouldn’t be surprising, since the GTX 1060 doesn’t have any dedicated ray tracing cores.
It will also feature 12GB VRAM, which is four more than the 8GB RTX 3060 Ti, which is interesting to say the least. As our Computing Editor pointed out in their live blog, this could make the 3060 Ti obsolete – though we’ll have to actually test the card to see if that ends up being true.
Most importantly though, is the price. At $329 (about £255 / AU$460), this definitely puts the RTX 3060 within the price range of just about every PC builder out there. And, it’s even cheaper than the RTX 2060, which was dropped to $349 (about £275, AU$500) when the RTX 2060 Super launched in 2019.
The card is expected to be released worldwide in late February. Hopefully it won’t run into nearly as much of a shortage issue as its more powerful predecessors.