Just in time, Nvidia has announced its latest GPU, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. If you were hesitant to pay for the flagships of the RTX 30 Series a few months ago, the 3060 Ti brings at least some of that power to a more suitable price.
The RTX 3060 Ti packs 4,864 CUDA cores (Nvidia processors working in parallel) and 8GB of GDDR6 memory, for clock speeds of up to 1.67 GHz. Like the other RTX 30 families, it’s built on the company’s Ampere architecture, and Nvidia says it’s even faster than the RTX 2080 Super – one of last year’s most powerful GPUs.
In pure quantities, the RTX 3060 Ti is less than the 2020 flagships that sail in September and October, but that’s not the point. It’s a card that can still count numbers for striking visual effects such as raytracing, a lighting technique in which the path of each photon is tracked to create more realistic reflections, refractive and shadows. And it can do so at resolutions of 1080p and 1440p, at high frame rates.
There is no patience to handle 4K and 8K resolutions like its larger siblings, but to be honest, the first doesn’t matter to many and the latter is still a few years away from being practical. The 3060 Ti is an early-level GPU that’s more than capable for those who aren’t too busy with all the keywords Nvidia likes. It’s basically still going to run it all, at least on the mid chart.
Perhaps the most important number is the price. The RTX 3060 Ti costs only US$399, which makes it a popular choice for those building middle-class gaming rigs. That said, the RTX 3070 is only 100 dollars more for a little more power, so it might be worth considering upgrading it. And as always, there will probably be an RTX 3060 budget that drops to the rankings around January, if Nvidia’s habits in the past are anything to go by.
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti will be available from December 2.
