Nvidia Announces GeForce RTX 3050, RTX 3090 Ti and Laptop 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti

[harlan4096]

More GPUs you can't buy!

Nvidia has finally announced a "budget" RTX card with the GeForce RTX 3050. Not to be confused with the laptop RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti, the desktop variant is a slightly different beast as it doubles down on the VRAM. Along with the 3050 desktop card, Nvidia also revealed details on the already leaked RTX 3090 Ti, and announced RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPUs. These will all compete to join our list of the best graphics cards. Here's what you need to know.

The RTX 3050 desktop card will use the same trimmed down GA107 GPU found in the mobile 3050/3050 Ti. That's not great news, since GA107 only has a 128-bit memory interface and up to 2560 CUDA cores. The desktop 3050 will use the maximum 20 SMs (streaming multiprocessors), giving it 2560 GPU cores, and of course the RTX 3050 also features RT cores for ray tracing and tensor cores for DLSS and other applications.

There is some good news in that the 3050 desktop card will at least feature 8GB of VRAM — much better than the 4GB used on the mobile 3050 Ti and 3050. Nvidia hasn't revealed whether that's 16Gbps GDDR6 or something else (18Gbps would be nice…), but we'll find out more in the next few weeks. Also on the good news front is that the TGP (total graphics power) is just 130W for the reference specs, though it sounds as though we'll see plenty of AIB partner cards still equipped with an 8-pin power connector — that's sufficient for 225W of total power, including the PCIe x16 slot.

The GeForce RTX 3050 will go on sale on January 27, with a suggested starting price of $249. It should also feature Nvidia's LHR anti-mining hardware, though as we've seen already, that's unlikely to truly stop miners from trying to grab the cards. Maybe Ethereum's long-awaited switch to proof of stake will help when that finally arrives sometime this year (fingers crossed). The RTX 3050 should also help to fill the gap between the RTX 3060 and the previous generation RTX 2060, though we'll have to wait and see how it performs once we can get cards in for testing.
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