The PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles may have been the hottest items on the market for console gamers, but PC gamers were after something even more elusive in 2020: One of Nvidia’s hot new graphics cards that were as rare as they were absolute units in size. A trio of new cards were unveiled last year, and promptly grabbed by those damn scalpers and their bot armies when they went on sale, but fret not!
Nvidia has a new new card on the way that you most likely won’t get your hands on either thanks to various online rapscallions. The GeForce RTX 3060 has ray-tracing capabilities and support for Nvidia DLSS, and will be available through the likes of ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac when it rolls out in February.
- 13 shader-TFLOPs
- 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing
- 101 tensor-TFLOPs to power NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling)
- 192-bit memory interface
- 12GB of GDDR6 memory
The key takeaway here is that the RTX 3060 is designed to be a new entry-level card, and in the US it’ll be priced at $329. In local currency that works out to “But if I convert directly from the dollar price it’s not nearly as much”. The RTX 3060 also supports DLSS, Reflex, and Broadcast, and it’ll provide a rather nice boost to games when paired with the right motherboard so that it can do its GPU magic.
Nvidia also revealed during last night’s presentation that RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 GPUs are coming to laptops, but be prepared to shell out a lot for them. Anything with an RTX 3080 inside the frame will set you back $2000 at the bare minimum, but the end result will be machines capable of over 100 frames per second on ultra settings when the resolution is set at 1440p. Meanwhile, laptops with RTX 3070 cards will hammer your bank account for around $2500, and are capable of playing games at 90 FPS on ultra settings provided that you set the resolution to 1440p.
Laptops with RTX 3060 cards will manage 90 FPS on newer games when ultra settings are run at 1080p, and will be more comfortably priced around the $1000 mark.
Last Updated: January 13, 2021
Iskape
January 13, 2021 at 03:43
The bare minimum for me would be the 3070. With a 4k screen, anything less than 1440p is pointless. I wish I had the cash for the 3090 though. That would be the ideal card! AMD just isn’t in the ballpark at the moment for me, although if I got a 6900XT cheap enough I would definitely take it!