Nvidia announces new GeForce RTX 3060 at CES 2021

Ampere for every gamer

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During itsCES 2021 keynote,Nvidiaannounced the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a mid-range graphics card designed to get ray traced gaming to every PC gamer.

The announcement, presented by Nvidia’s Jeff Fisher, gave some details about the new GPU. Claiming twice the raster performance of theGTX 1060, and 10 times the ray tracing performance – which shouldn’t be surprising, since the GTX 1060 doesn’t have any dedicated ray tracing cores.

It will also feature 12GB VRAM, which is four more than the8GB RTX 3060 Ti, which is interesting to say the least. As our Computing Editor pointed out in their live blog, this could make the 3060 Ti obsolete – though we’ll have to actuallytestthe card to see if that ends up being true.

Most importantly though, is the price. At $329 (about £255 / AU$460), this definitely puts the RTX 3060 within the price range of just about every PC builder out there. And, it’s even cheaper than the RTX 2060, which was dropped to $349 (about £275, AU$500) when the RTX 2060 Super launched in 2019.

The card is expected to be released worldwide in late February. Hopefully it won’t run into nearly as much of a shortage issue as its more powerful predecessors.

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John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY.

Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can find him online on Threads @johnloeffler.

Currently playing: Baldur’s Gate 3 (just like everyone else).

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