Nvidia’s newest entry in the GeForce RTX 3000-series is the $400 RTX 3060 Ti with monster 1440p performance and more.
I wrote a few months back about how I’m more excited about the RTX 3080 than the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. But as we move past the launch of the first RTX 3000 cards, the new consoles, and AMD’s high-end Radeons, it’s the more affordable GPUs that have my eye now. And Nvidia is finally delivering a first taste of that price range with the “surprise” reveal of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The 3060 Ti launches December 2 for $400, and it’s hardly a surprise. While rumors outed the existence of this GPU months ago, this announcement is still welcome. This is the obvious sweet spot for people gaming at 1440p, but it’s even viable as a 4K card — especially when combined with deep-learning supersampling (DLSS). I’ve spent a brief time testing the RTX 3060 Ti, so this isn’t a full appraisal of the GPU. But I do want to talk about where it fits into the current landscape and why it probably makes sense for you. The best sales pitch for the 3060 Ti is that it’s better than a 2080 Super in most games, but it costs $400 instead of $800. So while $400 feels like a lot for a 60-level Nvidia card, the value here is undeniable. And this power makes sense. The 3060 Ti is a cut-down version of the RTX 3070. It has fewer cores in fewer streaming multiprocessors (SMs), and it is rated for slightly slower clock speeds. But it has the same 8GBs of GDDR6 (not GDDR6X) memory as the 3070.
