Right on cue, Nvidia has announced its newest GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. If you were on the fence about forking out for the RTX 30 Series flagships a few months ago, the 3060 Ti brings at least some of that power down to a more palatable price.
The RTX 3060 Ti is packing 4,864 CUDA cores (Nvidia’s processors that work in parallel) and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, for clock speeds of up to 1.67 GHz. Like the rest of the RTX 30 family, it’s built on the company’s Ampere architecture, and Nvidia says it’s even faster than the RTX 2080 Super – one of the most powerful GPUs of last year.
In pure numbers the RTX 3060 Ti falls short of the 2020 flagships that set sail in September and October, but that’s not really the point. This is a card that can still crunch the numbers for flashy visual effects like raytracing, a lighting technique where the paths of each photon are traced to create more realistic reflections, refractions and shadows. And it can do that at resolutions of 1080p and 1440p, at high frame rates.
It is missing the grunt to handle 4K and 8K resolutions like its bigger siblings, but honestly, the former doesn’t matter to many people and the latter is still years away from being practical. The 3060 Ti is a more-than-capable entry-level GPU for those who weren’t too fussed about all the buzzwords Nvidia likes to throw around. It’ll still run basically everything, at medium graphics at least.
Perhaps the most important number then is the price. The RTX 3060 Ti is just US$399, which should make it a popular choice for those building a mid-tier gaming rig. That said, the RTX 3070 is only 100 bucks more for a bit more power, so maybe it’s worth considering stepping up a notch. And as always, there will probably be a budget RTX 3060 slipping into the ranks in about January, if Nvidia’s past habits are anything to go by.
The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti will be available from December 2.
Source: Nvidia
