NVIDIA has launched the RTX 3060, the youngest member of the RTX 30-series Ampere graphics cards but with more memory (12 GB) that the more powerful RTX 3060 Ti (8 GB). There will be no Founders Edition cards for the RTX 3060 so all of those GPUs have been allocated to board partners. Industry sources tell us that the stock situation for the RTX 3060 is similar to that of the RTX 3060 Ti. At the same time, NVIDIA's retail partner, RPTech has unlisted the RTX 3060 Ti from their official website. As of now, we do not know what this means for the RTX 3060 Ti. Whether it will be restocked, remains to be seen.
The RTX 3060 is a mid-range graphics card that's targeted at folks who own 900-series and 10-series graphics cards and supposedly offers 30% more performance than the RTX 2060 in rasterised and ray-traced video games. Listings for the graphics card have already gone up on several online stores with no official pricing being mentioned. Folks wanting to purchase the card will have to individually reach out to the stores to get the latest prices. The previously launched RTX 3060 Ti cards have been selling for nearly twice the stated MRP in India. The international price for the RTX 3060 is USD 329 (Approx INR 28,185 with taxes).
Rumours had indicated a weaker RTX 3060 prior to the launch of AMD's RX 6000 series GPUs. It would have had fewer SMs and equal or lesser memory than the RTX 3060 Ti. Thankfully, we now have an RTX 3060 that has 28 Streaming Multiprocessors which give us 3584 CUDA cores. They also include 112 3rd Gen Tensor Cores, 28 2nd Gen RT cores and a 192-bit memory interface. Essentially, you have a narrower bus addressing a much larger chunk of memory. Benchmarks should peg the card at about 75-80% of what the RTX 3060 Ti is capable of at 1080p.
Here are the specifications of the RTX 3060 compared against the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 2060 Super and GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5.
| Model | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 3060 | RTX 2060 Super | GTX 1060 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | GA104-200-A1 | GA106-400-A1 | TU106-410-A1 | GP106-400-A1 |
| CUDA Cores | 4864 | 3584 | 2176 | 1280 |
| Boost Clock | 1410 MHz | 1320 MHz | 1470 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| Memory | 8 GB | 12 GB | 8 GB | 6 GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 14 GHz | 14 GHz | 14 GHz | 8 GHz |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 192-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Bandwidth | 448 GB/s | 336 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 192 GB/s |
| TGP | 200 W | 170 W | 175 W | 120 W |
| Process | Samsung 8NM | Samsung 8NM | TSMC 12nm | TSMC 16nm |
It certainly seems like a worthwhile upgrade for folks who currently own a GTX 1060 or older graphics card whereas RTX 2060 Super owners can stay with their existing GPUs until the next major GPU launch happens.
While the RTX 3060 is expected to sport a more economical price tag compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, we don't expect to see Indian retailers selling it at the stated MRP any time soon. The stated MRP is USD 329 which with taxes comes out to around INR 28,185 but it's extremely unlikely that we'll see cards selling at that price. The global chip shortage problem is expected to last for another year and will only start easing up in the latter part of this year. So don't be surprised to see exorbitantly priced graphics cards for the next couple of months. NVIDIA is certainly doing their part by trying to provide founders edition cards in India at affordable rates via their retail partners, RPTech. However, only 10-40 cards are stocked around once every month or so. Moreover, the infrastructure has been shown to be barely sufficient to handle the web traffic load when the cards do go on stock.
NVIDIA has also limited hash rates on the RTX 3060 for select crypto mining software to ensure crypto miners don't go after the same card. It stands to be seen how long it will take for the miners to bypass the driver limitation.
As of today, RPTech has unlisted the RTX 3060 Ti from the website. You can still get to the RTX 3060 Ti page if you have the direct URL. It remains to be seen if the card will be restocked again.
The card was recently stocked on the 15th with about 40 units available on the day of sale and saw the portal crash multiple times througout the day.