12 Jan, 2021
0Nvidia threw a shot across AMD’s bow this week with the launch of its RTX 3060 graphic card. Coming in at just $329, that makes it the company’s most affordable RTX card yet.
The card is built on Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, meaning it’ll have full support for Nvidia’s latest and greatest features, including ray tracing (obviously!), DLSS 2.0, Reflex, Broadcast, and more. The most important of these is DLSS, which uses deep learning neural networks to render the game at a lower resolution (like 1080p) and upscale it to higher resolutions like 4K, with nearly no loss in image quality. That can make a big difference in fast-paced shooters and allow you to play at high resolutions while still enjoying smooth frame rates.
Packing 12GB of DDR6 memory, the RTX 3060 boasts a throughput of 13 shader TFLOPS, 25 RT TFLOPS, and 101 Tensor TFLOPs. Nvidia is touting the card as an upgrade over the aging GTX 1060 and claims that the combination of the new Ampere architecture and 2x the RAM as the older model will afford the RTX 3060 “twice the raster performance and 10x the ray-tracing performance.” Check out the graphic above for an example of the performance boost Nvidia expects over the RTX 2060 and GTX 1060.
Nvidia plans to launch the card worldwide sometime in February for $329 — if the scalpers don’t buy them all first, that is.
