Nvidia is reportedly set to restart manufacturing of its venerable GeForce RTX 3060 gaming GPU in a bid to discover a approach for PC players to have an inexpensive however fairly up-to-date graphics card improve over the approaching months. For these nonetheless caught on an previous GTX-era card, or maybe with an RTX 2060 or RTX 3050, the RTX 3060 ought to present a low-cost efficiency improve that has entry to all of Nvidia’s newest DLSS 4.5 tech, aside from body era.
Rising to the highest of the preferred graphics card listing on the October 2024 Steam {Hardware} Survey, the RTX 3060 was among the finest graphics playing cards of its time, offering a stable efficiency improve over the RTX 2060, with considerably higher ray tracing capabilities. Nevertheless, it’s now simply coming as much as being 5 years previous, and has been outdated by the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060. For players caught on even older {hardware}, although, it may very well be a welcome lifeline.
The important thing to this potential transfer is that Nvidia will probably be utilizing Samsung to fabricate the GPUs, as an alternative of TSMC. The latter is taken into account to have essentially the most cutting-edge silicon chip manufacturing on the planet in the mean time, and has produced the final a number of generations of Nvidia GPUs. Nevertheless, TSMC is essentially at manufacturing capability, with it busy making every part from Apple cellphone chips to massive Nvidia AI GPUs. Samsung, although, is able to dedicate manufacturing to those chips, utilizing the identical 8nm manufacturing node that was initially used to provide the RTX 3000 vary.
Rumors of this transfer have circulated since no less than January this yr, however now it has been confirmed by Korean enterprise website, Korea Financial Every day, that Samsung has restarted its 8nm manufacturing to fulfill Nvidia orders.
What is not but confirmed is the precise configuration of the RTX 3060 GPUs that will probably be produced. Initially, the cardboard got here with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which communicated with the GPU over a 192-bit reminiscence bus. Nevertheless, later variants dropped to 8GB of VRAM and used a narrower 128-bit bus, leading to considerably decrease efficiency (round 20% decrease).
Provided that RAM provide – together with VRAM – is a large a part of why present PC half costs are so excessive proper now, it will make plenty of sense for the brand new playing cards to return with the decrease VRAM configuration. Nevertheless, it may very well be that there is sufficient GDDR6 stockpiled to fulfill manufacturing calls for for the higher-spec card.
Additionally not confirmed is whether or not the playing cards will arrive with a brand new lower cost than when the cardboard was beforehand accessible, or if there’ll even be a publicly-announced launch. At present, the cardboard is successfully out of inventory in all retailers, however secondhand playing cards go for round $250 on Ebay, whereas RTX 4060 playing cards promote new for round $300. As such, we would hope {that a} reincarnated RTX 3060 would are available at $200 or much less, however that is still to be seen.
As for why the RTX 3060 ought to nonetheless have attraction so lengthy after its launch, in addition to providing stable 1080p gaming efficiency, the cardboard is absolutely appropriate with DLSS 4.5 and its now glorious upscaling. DLSS ray reconstruction can be accessible for enhancing ray-traced reflection picture high quality, and despite the fact that body era is not formally supported on 3000-series playing cards, there are instruments that may unlock this characteristic (one thing RTX 2000 and earlier playing cards cannot do).
