NVIDIA recently announced the new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card – the “little brother” of the RTX 3060 Ti. It is the direct successor of the RTX 2060, featuring 3584 CUDA cores. Interestingly, the RTX 3060 has more VRAM than the 3060 Ti, with 12GB of GDDR6 of memory. It also features ray tracing and DLSS technologies and is priced at $329. Check out more details below.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB Graphics Card
After watching NVIDIA’s recent CES 2021 presentation, it looks like they are selling the RTX 3060 to gamers currently using a GTX 1060 graphics card. According to NVIDIA, an estimated 90% of GeForce gamers currently play with a GTX-class GPU.
Undeniably, ray tracing, and DLSS technologies are here to stay. The number of game titles that feature ray tracing and DLSS is growing. Even NVIDIA’s competition, AMD, has adopted ray tracing as well.
NVIDIA added that the GeForce RTX 3060 has “twice the raster performance and 10x the ray-tracing performance of the GTX 1060”. It features 13 shader-TFLOPS, 25 RT-TFLOPs for ray tracing, and 101 tensor-TFLOPs to power NVIDIA DLSS.
What puzzles me is why NVIDIA decided to give it 12GB of GDDR6 memory instead of 8GB. The RTX 3060 Ti only has 8GB GDDR6 but is running at a 256-bit memory interface. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060 has 12GB of GDDR6, running at a slower 192-bit memory interface.
I believe that the RTX 3060 won’t be faster than the RTX 3060 Ti. They should have given more VRAM to the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 in the first place. The only reason I could think of is due to marketing.
It also allows them to introduce that they have adopted the Resizable BAR feature as well. According to the company, “Resizable BAR will be supported on the GeForce RTX 30 Series starting with the RTX 3060. When combined with a compatible motherboard, this advanced PCI Express technology enables all of the GPU memory to be accessed by the CPU at once, providing a performance boost in many games”.
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB vs RTX 3060 Ti Specifications
Below is a specs comparison between the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.
| RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 Ti | |
|---|---|---|
| Fab Process | 8nm Samsung | 8nm Samsung |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere |
| CUDA Cores | 3584 | 4864 |
| Base Clock | 1320 MHz | 1410 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1780 MHz | 1665 MHz |
| Memory Size | 12GB | 8GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Memory Clock | ??? | 14 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | ??? | 448 GBps |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit | 256-bit |
| Graphics Card Power | 170W | 200W |
| Recommended PSU | 550W | 350W |
| MSRP (At launch) | $329 | $399 |
RTX 3060 vs RTX 2060 vs GTX 1060 Comparison – Sort Of…
NVIDIA posted a performance chart showing the performance of the RTX 3060 in comparison with its predecessors.
Below is a specs comparison of the RTX 3060 vs RTX 2060 vs GTX 1060.
| RTX 3060 | RTX 2060 | GTX 1060 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fab Process | 8nm Samsung | 12nm FNN | 16nm TSMC |
| Architecture | Ampere | Turing | Pascal |
| CUDA Cores | 3584 | 1920 | 1280 |
| Base Clock | 1320 MHz | 1365 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1780 MHz | 1680 MHz | 1709 MHz |
| Memory Size | 12GB | 6GB | 6GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | ??? | 14 Gbps | 8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | ??? | 336 GBps | 192.2 GBps |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Graphics Card Power | 170W | 160W | 120W |
| Recommended PSU | 550W | 500W | 300W |
| MSRP (At launch) | $329 | $349 | $299 |
What do you think of the new RTX 3060? If you are a GTX 1060 user, will you upgrade to the new RTX 3060 (Ti) graphics card?
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards latest pricing and availability:
Check RTX 3060 Ti on Amazon.com here
Check RTX 3060 Ti on Newegg.com here
