Nvidia followed up Intel and AMD as the third big chip-maker to hold a CES 2021 press conference, announcing a new desktop graphics card and a trio of RTX 30-series GPUs for laptops. Let’s start with the big news first: the new mainstream RTX 3060 graphics card.
As rumoured, the RTX 3060 Ti has a baby brother: the plain ‘ol RTX 3060. The new graphics card ought to look identical from the outside – although it’s somehow pictured with only a single fan in Nvidia’s press materials – but it uses Nvidia’s low-end GA106 GPU rather than the mid-range GA104 we saw at the heart of the 3060 Ti and 3070.
From the charts provided by the Green Team, the 3060 should deliver roughly RTX 2070 or 2070 Super levels of performance – meaning comfortable 1080p or decent 1440p gaming in AAA titles, perhaps stretching to 4K in older games or at reduced settings.
Interestingly, the card features 12GB of GDDR6 memory, meaning it has more VRAM than both the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, which have just 8GB. It also has 15Gbps memory, compared to 14Gbps on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. However, this is somewhat balanced by its 192-bit memory interface, which is narrower than the 256-bit equivalent on the two more expensive cards.