After unveiling the GeForce RTX 30 series, we now have some information regarding NVIDIA’s plans for the budget-gamer. Twitter user @kopite7kimi has now shared the first specs for the GeForce RTX 3050, which will be the first graphics card to bring ray tracing to the (budget-centric) masses. While the RTX lineup has been available for over 3 years now, we never saw a 50-series card with Turing, and the 1650/1660 lineup did not include ray tracing hardware at all, despite offering decent raw gaming performance for their price.
The report was first picked up by Videocardz, who expect the RTX 3050 to ship with 4 GB GDDR6 memory. That would certainly be in line with the GTX 1050 Ti, and the GTX 1650 series. In the same tweet, we also see that the RTX 3050 will include 2304 CUDA Cores, which is a significant bump from the existing 50 series cards. That puts it in line with the RTX 2060 Super, which includes 2176 CUDA cores, albeit last generation cores at that. This should make the 3050 a really compelling choice as it would offer plenty of power for 1080p gamers, and maybe even handle a bit of 1440p. The only difference between the 3050 and the 2060 Super would then be the VRAM capacity and bandwidth, not to mention the RTX 3050’s lower TGP, which is almost half of the 2060 Super.
However, we also know that NVIDIA is working on the GeForce RTX 3060, which should offer a more robust upgrade for 1080p gamers looking for ray tracing. Currently, only higher-end 70 and 80-series cards are available from NVIDIA, which tend to be much more expensive. AMD also is going to release its Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT, which are competing with NVIDIA’s higher-end offerings.
It seems both AMD and NVIDIA will have plenty of new SKUs to offer budget gamers come early 2021. Earlier this year we saw NVIDIA offering a multitude of options in the budget segment with the 1650 and 1660 series, and we might see a similar thing happen next year.