Nvidia RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 Ti could soon be here – are GTX graphics cards getting killed off?

Nvidia could have GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 Ti graphics cards waiting in the wings which will be built around a new GPU (GA106, as previously rumored).

This is according to well-known leaker kopite7kimi, who shared this fresh GPU rumor on Twitter (and as ever, remember that this is just speculation which may or may not pan out).

Ah, the desktop cards based on GA106 will be called RTX 3060(3840FP32) and RTX 3050 Ti(3584FP32).😅I don't know if it will change in the future.November 4, 2020

The RTX 3050 Ti would represent a new move for Nvidia, having a lower-end card with ray tracing – so one possibility this raises is that GTX products could have been abandoned, and that all Ampere offerings will come with dedicated ray tracing cores (which is what the RTX designation indicates).

Check out our in-depth Nvidia RTX 3080 review
And these are all the best PC games
We'll show you how to build a PC

As you’re probably aware, away from the higher-end Ampere cards which have already been launched, all we’ve been hearing about in recent times is the rumored RTX 3060 Ti, which is based on the GA104 GPU (the same chip used in the RTX 3070 – albeit a cutdown version, so rumor has it).

Naturally, it fully makes sense that there will be an RTX 3060 – indeed, it’s normally the case that the vanilla version launches first, not the Ti spin. What’s really interesting here is seeing an RTX 3050 Ti pop up at this point, which as mentioned is a major departure for Nvidia.

Going by the leak, the RTX 3060 will run with 3,840 CUDA cores (compared to 4,864 for the RTX 3060 Ti, at least according to the buzz on the grapevine), and the RTX 3050 Ti won’t be far off the 3060 with 3,584 CUDA cores.

Memory differentiation?

As Videocardz reports, GA106 will supposedly run with a 192-bit memory bus, so that points to a memory loadout of 6GB for the RTX 3060 (remember that the RTX 3060 Ti rumor theorizes that it will be equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM). There’ll obviously need to be some differentiation between the 3060 and 3050 Ti graphics cards, and given that the core count is seemingly pretty close, that may come on the memory front.

Videocardz also reckons that we can expect the RTX 3060 in January 2021, with the RTX 3050 Ti set to arrive later in January, or perhaps February. There are also plans for a vanilla RTX 3050, which again reinforces the idea that GTX spins are no longer.

Speculation holds that the next Ampere GPU we will see from Nvidia will be the RTX 3060 Ti, which the latest rumor reckons has been delayed slightly, and will come out at the start of December.