NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 is scheduled for release on February 25, i.e. tomorrow, and some OEMs, such as GIGABYTE, have already started to unveil their first versions with fully customized designs. However, it remains to be seen how good the availability will be, and to what extent it is possible to maintain a reasonable price.
Given that NVIDIA decided to limit the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 in cryptocurrency, it would be most likely that such a graphics card would not be targeted by miners, and that gamers around the world would be able to access it without any problems, and without having to pay an inflated price. That’s the theory, but seeing the impact resale and speculation are having on the tech sector, we hesitant to take anything for granted.
When we reviewed the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti we were able to confirm that it was slightly superior to the RTX 2080 Super. With that in mind, it was easy to deduce where we would end up positioning the GeForce RTX 3060, between the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2070 Super, an intuition that wasn’t far off the mark, as we can see in the compilation of performance tests posted by VideoCardz.
The attached table speaks for itself, on average the GeForce RTX 3060 is 3% lower than the RTX 2070, and only 1% slower than the RTX 2070, although it manages to outperform both in some tests, such as Port Royal, focused on measuring ray tracing performance. If we compare it to the RTX 2060, we see that the performance improvement is, on average, 11%.
We know what you are thinking, that there is not as big a jump as you might expect, but we should keep in mind that we are looking at numbers that reflect performance in synthetic tests, and that the differences in real tests (games) between the GeForce RTX 3060 and the RTX 2070 could be much more marked, and in favor of the former.
GeForce RTX 3060 final specs and price
| Graphic core | GA106 at 8nm |
| SM Units | 28 |
| Cores for ray tracing | 28 |
| Tensor cores | 112 |
| Shaders | 3,584 |
| Working frequency | 1,320-1,777MHz |
| Graphic memory | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus | 192 bits |
| Memory speed | 15GHz |
| Texturing units | 112 |
| Raster units | 48 |
| TGP | 170W |
| Power connectors | One additional 8-pin |
| Recommended price | From $399 |
The GeForce RTX 3060 will be a graphics card intended for gaming, optimally, at 1080p with ray tracing enabled, and at 1440p with maximum qualities without ray tracing.
It will be interesting to see how it positions this model against AMD’s Radeon RX 6700, a mid-range graphics solution that, according to the latest information, will hit the market sometime in April.
