NVIDIA has set a release date for the GeForce RTX 3060, although the wait won’t be the biggest challenge. According to The Verge, the $329 mid-tier GPU will be available from retailers on February 25th at 12PM Eastern. You’ll have to snap up a third-party video card. Unlike the RTX 3060 Ti and other higher-end boards, there won’t be an official Founders Edition.
The base 3060 is a spiritual successor to cards like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060, and brings features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS to a sub-$350 NVIDIA card for the first time. It’s the slowest of the RTX 30 family to date with ‘just’ 3,584 CUDA cores, a 192-bit memory interface and a 1.32GHz base clock. However, it also has the most memory of any mainstream NVIDIA GPU, with 12GB of RAM it may be a better pick if you need that headroom more than you do raw computing power.
In January, Nvidia said it anticipates supply for its GPUs to both consumers and partners “will likely remain lean through Q1,” which doesn’t end until late April. To alleviate the short supply and sky-high prices, Nvidia confirmed yesterday that it plans to bring back its older RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards.
