Nvidia is still chasing its tail over RTX 3000 series stock. Months on from the reveal of its next-generation graphics cards, they still can't be found in stock anywhere, and due to the end of life status of its previous 2000 series, finding any reasonably powerful GPU is almost impossible. That said, It's still pushing forward with its new generation, announcing the new RTX 3060 at CES 2021's digital keynote.
The new card is said to be more powerful than an RTX 2080 Super, and will have a starting price of $330. Designated as a replacement for the the most popular PC graphics card for several years now, the GTX 1060. This one offers a significant uptick in performance, along with a massive 12GB of GDDR6. That latter point is a curious one, however, as it's more than all three of the higher-powered RTX 3000 cards: the RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3080.
That's countered by the smaller memory bus, however, at just 192-bit. The 3060 also droops the CUDA core count from 4,864 in the Ti model, to 3,584, but has a slightly higher clock speed of 1.78GHz.
While we don't yet know how the new card will stack up against new-generation RTX 3000 cards, Nvidia did show us a comparison of how it fared against the RTX 1060 and 2060. It will reportedly improve on RTX 2060 performance by between 10 and 50 percent depending on the game, and as much as 500 percent over the 1060 in select AAA games.
This should roughly put it in 1080-1080Ti territory. A pretty big improvement for anyone running a GTX 1060. Especially the 3GB version. The 3060 will also have very capable DLSS and RTX ray tracing support.