Tuesday, December 19th 2023
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB to Get a Formal Release in February 2024
The GeForce RTX 3050 has been around since January 2022, and formed the entry level of the company's RTX 30-series. It had its moment under the Sun during the crypto GPU shortage as a 1080p gaming option that sold around the $300 mark. With the advent of the RTX 40-series, NVIDIA is finding itself lacking an entry-level discrete GPU that it can push in high volumes. Enter the RTX 3050 6 GB. Cut down from the original RTX 3050, this SKU has 6 GB of memory across a narrower 96-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and fewer shaders. Based on the tiny GA107 "Ampere" silicon, it gets 2,048 CUDA cores compared to the 2,560 of the RTX 3050, a core-configuration NVIDIA refers to as the GA107-325. The card has a tiny typical graphics power (TGP) of just 70 W, and so we should see graphics cards without additional power connectors. The company plans to give the RTX 3050 6 GB a formal retail channel launch in February 2024, at a starting price of $179.
Source:
VideoCardz
63 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB to Get a Formal Release in February 2024
An Rx6600 wit 8GB is cheaper.
Maybe ill build a NIDS out of them.
MSRP 200 (so $20 more for a card that had even less memory) price at the time of review mid-bubble, 350. It was being actively defended "as a proper 5500 XT successor", "might be my go to card if it's ever at MSRP", "it's 2% faster than the 5500 XT and wasn't price hiked, it's not so bad!" are some of the first comments in that review's comment thread. Eventually faced with reality, they just started to call it a bad card all around instead of going on expressive tirades about how AMD is actually dastardly evil.
I'm just saying...
The value for money has completely vanished on the low end. It was never the sweet spot, granted, but never since S3 Virge have we seen such garbage infesting the entry level GPU range. And no - it wasn't the i740. The i740, for its time, and at the price it ended up selling, was much, much better than this festering dungpile of pus.
Buying GPUs for leisure never looked as much worse than throwing your gold away in the casino as it looked back then.
Which is why they are doing this on low-end Ampere rather than recent Ada Lovelace.
Shocked that it's coming back in 2024, has to be a joke ? (might as well just keep making/selling the 2060)
Plus, my favorite game is an OpenGL game, from 2003, which, while using an RX 6400, reaches 30 FPS in the spot that's most difficult to render, and I'm remembering it reaching 60 FPS in that same spot while using a GT 1030 (while the GT 1030 had a PCIe 2.0 x4 connection). Yes, the RX 6400 is worse than the GT 1030 while playing an OpenGL game, even though I had a halved PCIe connection with the 1030. Nvidia cards have better support of OpenGL, but the RX 6400 is a vast improvement in all other games I've tried. (People with far better Radeon cards have mentioned the same problems with that specific game.)
Plus, are we sure that Nvidia will reduce the number of cores of the 3050 6 GB from 2560 to 2048? The version for laptops has 2560 cores, and it already doesn't use more than 75 watts. This article from "TechPowerUp" links to an article from the "VideoCardz" website, which links to a website called "Board Channels", which is a foreign website that we cannot see without logging in. But, this same story from a website called "WCCFTECH" links to a website called "ITHome" as the source, which is a foreign website too, but we don't need to log in to read it, so using a translation website shows us that the "ITHome" website claims the card will have 2560 cores.
Click here to see TechPowerUp's page about the 3050 6 GB that uses 75 watts and still has 2560 cores.
Click here to see the "ITHome" website that mentions 2560 cores.
Who should we trust? Perhaps Nvidia hasn't decided whether it wants to give 2560 cores to the bad people (like me). Plus, some rumors have suggested a range from 70 watts to 100 watts. Could the truth be that, regardless of whether Nvidia will choose 2560 cores or 2048 cores, this will be the final product Nvidia will ever provide to the bad people who have a slot-powered card as their cheapest route to more power, and when the stock is depleted, Nvidia will sell the true 4050 targeted at 90 to 100 watts, which caused some confused sources of rumors to mention the range of 70 to 100 watts?
This bad 3050 may be the final mercy shown to the bad people, provided only because of old stock of the regular 3050 that was either unsold after the pandemic or has defected components that must be disabled, so it cannot reach the full quality of the regular 3050. Without that situation, they might not have ever decided to release a slot-powered card again.
I haven't decided whether I will buy it, but I will tell you this: even if AMD releases a better card that still doesn't require more than 75 watts, and it's cheaper, I still won't choose it, because one of the few games I'll ever play more than once uses OpenGL, and AMD doesn't care about that. (And imagine the horror of Intel's drivers with OpenGL.)
And for this month:
I surmise these newer 6 GB mobile 3050s are slower than the original unless the VRAM budget is really badly blown up, because of the reduction in memory bandwidth. For what it's worth, if my laptop's performance (original 128-bit 3050 overclocked at 2 GHz and 13 Gbps memory, 80 watt version) is anything to go by, it should perform acceptable - but I have concerns. I think it'll be slower than the equivalent power (70 and 80 watt) versions of the original 3050M and especially the 3050M Ti.