Introduction

NVIDIA today launched the GeForce RTX 3060 "Ampere" graphics card, and Zotac sent us their most premium product based on this chip, the Zotac RTX 3060 AMP White Edition. This card retains the compact design of Zotac's RTX 3060-series, but has a few premium bits, such as a more elaborate aluminium fin-stack heatsink, an all-white cooler, and factory-overclocked speeds that are a notch above even the standard (black) RTX 3060 AMP. The RTX 3060 is set to be the most important SKU from the "Ampere" generation as the xx60 series tend to sell the most in terms of volumes. The RTX 3060 provides a logical upgrade path for the GTX 1060 6 GB "Pascal" by enabling 1440p gaming with reasonably high settings, or maxed out 1080p gaming with raytracing.



The Ampere graphics architecture powering the Zotac RTX 3060 AMP White Edition represents the 2nd generation of NVIDIA's path-breaking RTX technology, which combines new Ampere CUDA cores with concurrent FP32+INT32 math performance, 2nd generation RT cores which double the intersection performance over the previous generation, hardware for raytraced motion-blur effects, and 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in neural nets to increase AI inference performance significantly. The RTX 3060 features full DirectX 12 Ultimate logo readiness.

Powering the RTX 3060 is the new 8 nm "GA106" silicon, the smallest chip from the Ampere generation thus far. It comes with 3,584 Ampere CUDA cores, 112 3rd generation Tensor cores, 28 Ampere RT cores, 112 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. NVIDIA has doubled the memory amount over the previous-generation, to 12 GB. The memory bus width and memory type are unchanged—192-bit GDDR6, although the memory clock has been increased slightly.

As mentioned earlier, the Zotac RTX 3060 AMP White Edition is the company's most premium RTX 3060 offering, with an elaborate aluminium fin-stack heatsink, two fans of different sizes, a groovy all-white cooler shroud, and factory-overclocked speeds of 1867 MHz, compared to the 1770 MHz reference. Zotac hasn't provided any pricing information, but we expect the card will end up in roughly the middle of the RTX 3060 price range.