NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB — 2026 relaunch review

NVIDIA resurrects the RTX 3060 12GB, a five-years-old architecture for 2026?

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB, relaunched in 2026 at full MSRP

NVIDIA originally launched the RTX 5050 on September 1, 2021, with an nominal MSRP of $329. I say "nominally" because that was right in the middle of the GPU crypto-mining era and almost none of the RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs sold at anything close to MSRP right up until the follow-up RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs appeared. It was one of the potentially best graphics cards available in terms of bang for the buck, with double the VRAM of its predecessor (the 2060) and plenty of bandwidth, along with a decent upgrade in computational power and features.

When the RTX 4060 arrived about two years later (June 29, 2023), people were pissed. NVIDIA chopped the memory interface down to 128 bits and reduced the memory capacity back to 8GB. There were still plenty of instances where the 4060 offered improved performance, but a lot of that also depended on support for the then-new DLSS 3 frame generation. Simply put, FG remains far more marketing hype than an actual performance improvement. It's frame smoothing, pure and simple — and yes, backed by AI computations to make it "better" the previously existing algorithms. It's not bad, but the performance claims made by NVIDIA are at best exaggerated in regards to how a game feels with FG enabled. At worst? It's blantant false advertising. But that ship has sailed.

Now NVIDIA even has the RTX 5060 GPU, released on May 19, 2025 — still over a year ago! It still has 8GB, like the 4060, which means even the relatively ancient 3060 12GB still offers 50% more VRAM capacity. Then you toss in the massive spike in memory costs thanks to the AI sector, and of course the newer GPUs from NVIDIA have switched to GDDR7 (except for the RTX 5050), and suddenly the idea of re-releasing the RTX 3060 12GB starts to make sense. Except it's still at that original $329 MSRP. So much for depreciation. Let's hit the specs.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 review: Still 8GB so it needs DLSS to try to save the day

NVIDIA's minimum entry point for Blackwell desktops, the RTX 5050 lags behind the 5060 given the performance/price ratio.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Introduction

NVIDIA launched the RTX 5050 on July 1, 2025. It’s an interesting card because we didn’t have an RTX 4050, but we had a 3050. We didn’t have an RTX 2050, but we had a GTX 1650. And we also had the GTX 1050 if you go way back when, and GTX 950 and 750 back in the day. But this is the first true budget desktop GPU from Team Green in four years. How does it fare? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s talk specs and how the 5050 stacks up on paper.

This is where things get a little interesting. So this is a $250 card. The step up to the 5060 is $50 more — that’s a 20% increase in price. The 5050 comes with 20 streaming multiprocessors (SMs), and you get 128 CUDA cores per SM, so 2,560 CUDA cores versus 30 SMs on the 5060 — a 50% increase.

Now, the 5050 does have slightly higher clock speeds, and the ASUS card, like I said, is factory overclocked, but it’s not going to close a 50% gap. It’s going to maybe make it to a 40–45% gap on compute. The RTX 5050 also has GDDR6 memory running at 20 GT/s. The 5060 and above all use GDDR7 memory running at 28 GT/s (actually 30 on the RTX 5080, but that’s a different story).

So that’s almost 50% more theoretical performance for the RTX 5060 is what we’re really talking about — probably 40% in a lot of situations, for 20% more money. That right there makes the RTX 5050 a non-starter in my opinion. And yet I bought one because, hey, let’s see how it performs, right? I did pay my own money for this card. Thanks, ASUS and NVIDIA — you didn’t send it to me, and I get to say whatever I want.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 8GB review: 8GB just isn’t enough for a modern $300+ graphics card

The RTX 5060 runs well enough when it doesn't run out of VRAM, basically providing a horizontal shift from the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB for $100 less (two years later).

GPU Testbed
Asus RTX 5060 Dual OC
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU
Asus ROG Crosshair 870E Hero
G.Skill 2x16GB DDR5
Crucial T705 4TB SSD
Corsair HX1500i PSU
Cooler Master 280mm AIO

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, with 8GB of VRAM, lands at the $299 price point, with factory overclocked cards pushing prices slightly higher. It replaces the RTX 4060 8GB in the product stack, with largely similar specifications that we'll get to in a moment. Built on the Blackwell architecture, the card promises higher performance than its predecessor, with GDDR7 memory boosting bandwidth by an impressive 65%. Still, 8GB of memory on a card that costs over $300 is a concern, much bigger now than when the 4060 launched — and it was a problem then as well!

We’ve been seeing Nvidia GPUs with 8GB of VRAM since the GTX 1070 in 2016. That was a $379 card at launch, which would be about $500 in today's money... but we do expect a certain element of computer components getting faster for the same price. Regardless, the VRAM is a potential sticking point. 1080p medium to high settings should work well enough, but maxed out settings, or even high settings with upscaling and frame generation, could push beyond the GPU's VRAM capacity. 8GB of VRAM simply doesn’t cut it anymore for a “new” GPU launching in 2025.

We’ve benchmarked the ASUS Dual RTX 5060, comparing it to a variety of current and previous generation GPUs, across our full suite of modern titles at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. The short version? It’s generally a solid performer for 1080p gaming, but like its predecessors, the limited memory capacity becomes a serious concern the moment you crank up the settings. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for instance flat-out refused to run on 8GB NVIDIA cards, even though AMD and Intel GPUs with 8GB managed to give it a go. In short, it's NVIDIA doing its best to marginalize the lower tier GPUs.

RTX 5090 vs 4090 vs 3090/Ti vs Titan RTX: Comparing Four Generations of Nvidia's Fastest GPUs

How do Nvidia's fastest GPUs of the past four generations stack up, seven years after the Titan RTX launch?

Seven years ago, Nvidia released the Titan RTX — the last of the Titans, with the xx90 series GPUs inheriting the crown. People like to complain about how expensive the halo GPUs are, but it's nothing new. The Titan RTX launched at $2,499, which no GeForce card has ever (officially) matched. Of course, it offered some other extras, like improved professional graphics support. The Titan RTX might seem like a terrible deal compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, at twice the price for a minor performance bump and more than double the VRAM, but compared to the Quadro RTX 8000 and Quadro RTX 6000, it was one-third the cost with most of the other features intact.

I digress. The halo GPUs from Nvidia have long since ceased to compete as a value proposition, though arguably the 5090 and 4090 are better "values" than the step down 5080 and 4080 for the most recent generations. We've put together full GPU performance hierarchies for the Blackwell RTX 50-series, Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs, and Ampere RTX 30-series, and we're working on a Turing RTX 20-series hierarchy. But in the meantime, with testing of the Titan RTX complete, we wanted to look at these top-tier GPUs to see the progression over the past seven years.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-Series Graphics Card Performance Hierarchy

The Nvidia Blackwell architecture mostly rehashes Ada, using the same process node. Only the RTX 5090 stands out as a major (-ly expensive) upgrade.

Welcome to the modern era of Nvidia graphics cards, courtesy of the Blackwell architecture. Except, if we're being honest here — unlike Nvidia — not a whole helluvalot has changed architecturally with Blackwell relative to Ada Lovelace. We can sum up the major upgrades quite quickly.

First, Blackwell has native FP4 support on the tensor cores, which as of yet has only been used in a handful of applications, like a special version of AI image generation using Flux built into a special version of UL's Procyon benchmark. Blackwell also offers native FP6 support, which is sort of a hybrid between FP4 and FP8 that can potentially reduce memory requirements, but our understanding is that it's not really any faster than just using native FP8 operations.

Blackwell does offer some new features for ray tracing applications, but as with all other ray tracing tools, developer uptake can often be quite slow, particularly in regards to new games using the features. An enhanced triangle cluster intersection engine allows Mega Geometry (a new buzzword from Nvidia!) to better render massively complex scenes without bogging down. It feels a bit to me like the old over-tessellation approach where Nvidia got some games (like Crysis 2 or 3, IIRC) to utilize massive amounts of tesselation... on flat surfaces! Why? Because AMD's GPUs struggled mightily with the workload so it made Nvidia's GPUs look better.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series Graphics Card Performance Hierarchy

Ada Lovelace delivered massive efficiency improvments, but needed the framegen crutch to really "boost" performance

Everyone was looking forward to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards. After two horribly long years of shortages caused by cryptomining, along with the influenece of the Covid pandement, GPU prices and availability had finally started to settle down by the summer of 2022. Ethereum mining was dead, and rumors were that Nvidia was pulling out all the stops with its next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture. Smaller lithography courtesy of TSMC's cutting-edge 4N (4nm Nvidia) process node would leapfrog what AMD was planning. Everything seemed like it would be great.

When the RTX 4090 arrived on October 12, it made no excuses. It offered a substantial 50–75 percent performance improvement over the previous generation RTX 3090, only cost $100 more, and while the supply was definitely constrained, at least cryptominers weren't snapping up every GPU. The RTX 4080 followed a month later, on November 16, but by then things were turning sour. Nvidia had pre-announced the 4080 16GB and 4080 12GB variants, but the two cards had virtually nothing in common, and people were pissed. Also, prices were seemingly influenced by the cryptoboom, even though that had ended. $1,199 for the 4080 took the overpriced 3080 Ti's place, while the 4080 12GB was going to cost $899 while offering far less in the specs and performance departments.

Well, one thing lead to another and Nvidia axed the 4080 12GB name and changed that to the 4070 Ti — with a $100 price cut. But it was still clear that the rest of the RTX 40-series cards wouldn't quite manage to live up to the lofty results posted by the 4090. The 4080 was certainly faster than the 3080, by 50–70 percent, depending on the game and settings used. But it was also 70% more expensive than its predecessor. Alternatively, it was about 35% faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, which was still a pretty decent result.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Card Performance Hierarchy

How do Nvidia's Ampere RTX 30-series GPUs stack up five years later?

Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs with the RTX 3080 10GB card on September 17, 2020 — very nearly five years ago as I write this. It followed that with the RTX 3090 one week later, and then the RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3060 12GB, and RTX 3050 8GB over the following months. A bit less than one year after the initial launch, Nvidia then released the 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti, with the final RTX 3090 Ti coming in the spring of 2022.

The GPUs were all good on paper, for the most part, but at the time of launch virtually every one of these graphics cards ended up being a massive disappointment for gamers. Pardon me if I'm dredging up old memories that might still cause PTSD, but late 2020 through early 2022 was a perfect storm of awfulness in the graphics card industry. Ethereum mining was massively profitable during portions of that time, to the point where miners were scooping up every viable GPU and were often willing to pay over triple the MSRPs. On top of that, we had the Covid pandemic causing more people to work from home — or stay home to play games — and plenty of folks were upgrading their PCs. Massive GPU shortages ensued.

But now all of that is past, and we have had two new generations of Nvidia GPUs in the interim, the RTX 40-series using the Ada Lovelace architecture arrived beginning in the fall of 2022, and then the RTX 50-series with the Blackwell architecture launched at the start of 2025. You wouldn't necessarily go out and buy a new RTX 30-series GPU today, but how do these older generation GPUs compare to the modern stuff?

Welcome to the GPU Hierarchy

Hey there! If you're a long-time reader of my blog (all ten of you), you're going to see a name change. I've rebranded as The GPU Hierarchy, and testing of graphics card performance will be my primary goal going forward.

What started out as a blog about cryptocurrency mining WAAAY back in the day has morphed quite a bit. I haven't done any mining in years, as it has become generally unprofitable — especially considering the upfront hardware costs — but I do know a lot about graphics cards. If you know who I am and my employment history, that shouldn't be a surprise, but I'm going to try to stay mostly anonymous here.

Yes, it's been about two years since I wrote anything here. My full-time job was keeping me very busy. Now I've got a bit more freetime, so I'm going to put that to good use.

I've been testing (and retesting...) all of the modern graphics card for a while, and I'm going to start publishing a full suite of performance results. We'll have tables and charts of performance data, along with power, efficiency, and other metrics. Everything will be linked to Amazon listings (or at least a search of Amazon listings), which helps support the site. But more importantly, I want this to become a great resource for people looking to purchase or upgrade their gaming GPU.

I've assembled a test suite of 15 reasonably modern games, three of which have ray tracing effects enabled. That's 20% of games with RT enabled, and I feel that's probably about as much weight as ray tracing deserves. Upscaling and frame generation techniques will be left off, because I view those as performance enhancements rather than baseline measurements.

To be clear, I routinely enable DLSS and FSR when gaming, but fundamentally those differ in appearance — with XeSS being the red-headed stepchild that differs yet again. Plus we now have DLSS 2/3/4, FSR 2/3/4, and XeSS 1.x/2.x as options, all of which look and perform differently! Perhaps that's a story for another day and some deeper investigations, but for now we'll stick with reference performance.

So, welcome back if you've been here before (when it was hosted at HolyNerdvana). If you're new, welcome to my graphics card blog and site. I'm a veteran of the GPU industry, having tested and reviewed a variety of hardware for over two decades. I know a lot about GPUs and graphics cards, I have a variety of opinions, and this is where I'll be sharing them now.

This is a fully independent website, meaning there's no big publisher telling me what to write, when to write it, and how often I should spend a long weekend looking for BS Black Friday, Prime Day, Labor Day, etc. deals. Just the straight stuff here. I hope you find it useful, and comments are welcome. Note also the general lack of advertising, which should hopefully mean the pages load quickly. If things go well, maybe I'll get some sponsorships, but I hope to keep such things to a minimum — a throwback to the good old days of the web.

GPU Efficiency and Value Compared

I've done a lot of testing of graphics cards, and I wanted to present some interesting data. I've got nearly all of the latest generation Nvidia RTX 40-series, AMD RX 7000-series, and Intel Arc A-series GPUs tested. One of the cool things about my testing is that I get power data for every benchmark. I've then split all of the results into two separate tables, which are sortable by clicking on the top column: Rasterization Performance and Ray Tracing Performance.

There are 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for most of the cards, though slower cards aren't tested at 1440p and 4K with ray tracing enabled as it's rather pointless. I'm not sure exactly what this will look like on my blog, but let's give it a shot. We'll start with the rasterization table.

GPU Performance Hierarchy and the Best Graphics Cards, November 2022

With graphics cards finally back in stock, I've put together this comprehensive GPU performance hierarchy of the past two (now starting on three) generations of graphics cards. These are the best graphics cards around, but it's also important to know what you're getting. I've benchmarked all of these cards, at multiple resolutions and settings. Here's how they stack up across a test suite of 15 games.

I've also listed current GPU prices, which have improved substantially over the past few months. Most AMD graphics cards are now selling at or below their official MSRPs, and Nvidia's fastest GPUs (RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, and RTX 3090 Ti) are also well below their MSRPs. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 have also launched, alongside the various Intel Arc GPUs. Here's the current list, updated regularly as new GPUs arrive.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 10GB (Non-XT) Review and Specifications, Featuring Sapphire

We've got something new for today: My first graphics card review for the site. It's mostly because this is a card that hasn't been reviewed much, the AMD Radeon RX 6700 non-XT 10GB model. This GPU came later in the life cycle, and it sits roughly between the RX 6650 XT and RX 6700 XT — in price as well as performance. It's sort of a last gasp for RDNA 2, right as RDNA 3 cards are about to launch, though the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will be priced in an entirely different category. You can already find the FPS results in our GPU performance hierarchy, but let's dig into things a bit deeper for this review.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 10GB Specifications
Architecture	Navi 22
Process Technology	TSMC N7
Transistors (Billion)	17.2
Die size (mm^2)	336
Compute Units	36
GPU Cores (Shaders)	2304
Ray Accelerators	36
Boost Clock (MHz)	2450
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	16
VRAM (GB)	10
VRAM Bus Width	160
Infinity Cache	80
Render Outputs	64
Texture Mapping Units	144
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	11.3
FP16 TFLOPS (Half-Precision)	22.6
Bandwidth (GB/s)	320
Total Board Power (Watts)	175
Launch Date	March 18, 2021
Launch Price	$369 (unofficial)

For quite some time, the Radeon RX 6700 XT was the only desktop card to use AMD's Navi 22 GPU. Later, the RX 6750 XT joined the fun, and both are fully enabled variants of the chip. Given there are always defective die from a wafer, and most of those can be harvested by disabling the affected functional units (CUs, SMs, memory controllers, etc.), we long expected there would be an RX 6700 non-XT card. But it didn't come, and it didn't come, and then it suddenly stealth-launched from a couple of AMD's AIC (add-in card) partners: Sapphire and XFX. Maybe there are others making the 6700 10GB, but in the US at least these are the only ones available.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Specifications

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is the slightly smaller sibling of the just-announced Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Using the same RDNA 3 architecture and GPU chiplets, but with one fewer MCD (Memory Cache Die), it will presumably land just a bit lower down on our GPU performance hierarchy when it arrives on December 13.

We have to admit that the naming certainly represents a bit of an annoyance. The only difference between the RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT is one letter, and yet the latter will definitely have less performance. For all the people that were up in arms over the RTX 4080 16GB and RTX 4080 12GB shenanigans, this doesn't really feel any better. Regardless, these are the names AMD has chosen and we'll have to see how they match up. Here's the rundown of the RX 7900 XT specs.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Specifications
Architecture	Navi 31
Process Technology	TSMC N5 + N6
Transistors (Billion)	58
Die size (mm^2)	300 + 185
Compute Units	84
GPU Cores (Shaders)	10752
Ray Accelerators	84
Boost Clock (MHz)	2400
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	20
VRAM (GB)	20
VRAM Bus Width	320
Infinity Cache	80
Render Outputs	192
Texture Mapping Units	336
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	51.6
FP16 TFLOPS (Half-Precision)	103.2
Bandwidth (GB/s)	800
Total Board Power (Watts)	300
Launch Date	December 13, 2022
Launch Price	$899

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Specifications

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has officially been announced, the first in a salvo of RDNA 3 architecture GPUs that will compete with the best graphics cards. It's a radical new approach to GPU designs, using chiplets — in a similar fashion to how AMD uses chiplets on its Zen 3 and Zen 4 CPUs. Except here the use of chiplets has been tuned and tweaked to work best for graphics rather than CPUs. 

The specifications for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX are mostly known at this point, though there are a few missing pieces. For example, AMD provided details on its "Game Clock" but not on the Boost Clock, and it appears to have rounded things off to the nearest 100 MHz. Maybe. We do have a compute teraflops figure that seems to be based off the boost clock, however, which means we mostly have what we need.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Specifications
Architecture	Navi 31
Process Technology	TSMC N5 + N6
Transistors (Billion)	58
Die size (mm^2)	300 + 222
Compute Units	96
GPU Cores (Shaders)	12288
Ray Accelerators	96
Boost Clock (MHz)	2500
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	20
VRAM (GB)	24
VRAM Bus Width	384
Infinity Cache	96
Render Outputs	192
Texture Mapping Units	384
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	61.4
FP16 TFLOPS (Half-Precision)	122.8
Bandwidth (GB/s)	960
Total Board Power (Watts)	355
Launch Date	December 13, 2022
Launch Price	$999

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Specifications

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 currently reigns as the king of graphics cards — to see how performance stacks up, check our extensive list of GPU benchmarks and the best graphics cards. It uses Nvidia's latest Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, with the largest of the Ada chips: AD102. The combination of lots of cores and high clock speeds results in incredible levels of performance — the reference Founders Edition has a 2,520 MHz boost clock, and often runs at over 2.7 GHz in testing.

Note that the RTX 4090 doesn't use a fully enabled AD102 chip, as it has 128 of the potential 144 SM (Streaming Multiprocessor) blocks enabled, along with 72MB of the potential 96MB of L2 cache. We'll probably see a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti in the future, as there's certainly room for it.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Specifications
Architecture	AD102
Process Technology	TSMC 4N
Transistors (Billion)	76.3
Die size (mm^2)	608.4
Streaming Multiprocessors	128
GPU Cores (Shaders)	16384
Tensor Cores	512
RT Cores	128
Boost Clock (MHz)	2520
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	21
VRAM (GB)	24
VRAM Bus Width	384
L2 Cache	72
Render Outputs	176
Texture Mapping Units	512
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	82.6
FP16 TFLOPS with Sparsity (FP8)	661 (1321)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	1008
Total Board Power (Watts)	450
Launch Date	October 12, 2022
Launch Price	$1,599

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Specifications

Let's take a moment this Thanksgiving season to express our gratitude over the fact that Nvidia caved into pressure from the PC enthusiast community and canceled the RTX 4080 12GB, which means the RTX 4080 16GB is now the only RTX 4080-class GPU coming down the pipeline — we'll add it to our list of GPU benchmarks and the best graphics cards as soon as it's available.

There will of course be future RTX 4080 Ti / Super / Whatever cards at some point — probably next year — but those will presumably be clearly labeled as such. Really, it's a case of people being pissed about Nvidia trying to charge $899 for a card with only 12GB VRAM on a 192-bit memory interface.

While the RTX 4080 takes the reigns from the previous generation RTX 3080, it's also worth pointing out that it's inheriting the pricing of the RTX 3080 Ti rather than the far more attractively priced RTX 3080 (10GB). The RTX 4080 (formerly 16GB) meanwhile still has the following specs.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Specifications
Architecture	AD103
Process Technology	TSMC 4N
Transistors (Billion)	45.9
Die size (mm^2)	378.6
Streaming Multiprocessors	76
GPU Cores (Shaders)	9728
Tensor Cores	304
RT Cores	76
Boost Clock (MHz)	2505
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	22.4
VRAM (GB)	16
VRAM Bus Width	256
L2 Cache	64
Render Outputs	112
Texture Mapping Units	304
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	48.7
FP16 TFLOPS with Sparsity (FP8)	390 (780)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	717
Total Board Power (Watts)	320
Launch Date	November 16, 2022?
Launch Price	$1,199

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Specifications

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 launched in Aprile 2023, with reduced specs compared to the higher tier models. Nvidia increased the generational pricing by $100 this round, and performance basically matches the previous generation RTX 3080 10GB card.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Specifications
Architecture	AD104
Process Technology	TSMC 4N
Transistors (Billion)	32.0
Die size (mm^2)	294.5
Streaming Multiprocessors	46
GPU Cores (Shaders)	5888
Tensor Cores	184
RT Cores	46
Boost Clock (MHz)	2475
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	21
VRAM (GB)	12
VRAM Bus Width	192
L2 Cache	36
Render Outputs	64
Texture Mapping Units	184
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	29.1
FP16 TFLOPS with Sparsity (FP8)	233 (466)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	504
Total Board Power (Watts)	200
Launch Date	April 2023
Launch Price	$599 ($549)

The simple solution is to not launch a $600 RTX 4070 until most of the RTX 3080/3090 inventory has been sold. It's the holiday shopping spree season now, and obviously Nvidia thinks it can get away with this tactic. Delaying the RTX 4070 a couple of months — and building up a larger inventory of such GPUs in the meanwhile — won't really hurt, especially if Nvidia can successfully clear out all of those Ampere GPUs.

And it probably can! Technologically savvy people who read this blog might not be duped into buying an overpriced RTX 30-series card at this point in time, but there are tons of less knowledgeable gamers that just want a new high-end PC or graphics card for Christmas, Hanukah, or whatever. And if Nvidia and its partners can't sell all of those Ampere GPUs directly to gamers, rest assured there are large OEMs like Dell (Alienware), HP (Omen), Lenovo (Legion), etc. who will buy loads of cards at a discount and foist them off on the type of people who can't be bothered to build their own PCs.

Looking at the potential RTX 4070 specifications, it could very well end up with the same amount of VRAM and theoretical compute performance as the previous generation RTX 3080 Ti. Of course it has just a bit more than half the memory bandwidth, but the 48MB of L2 cache should make up for that. You also get all the Ada Lovelace architectural upgrade, like support for DLSS3.

While we wait the arrival of the RTX 4070, anyone who wants more performance and are willing to pay for it can step up to the RTX 4080 or RTX 4090, Just the way Lord Jensen would like it.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Specifications

Last generation's ultimate GPU, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti only launched in late March of 2022 — to see how performance stacks up, check our extensive list of GPU benchmarks and the best graphics cards. It was also a product of the cryptocurrency era, which meant GPU supply still hadn't caught up with demand and Nvidia felt it could get away with an exorbitant launch price of $1,999.

A few months later, demand plummeted and Nvidia dropped the 3090 Ti Founders Edition price to $1,099 at Best Buy, which in turn pissed off some of its add-in card (AIC) partners like EVGA, who ultimately decided to stop making graphics cards altogether — and who probably has a shload of RTX 30-series parts still in stock that it's trying to offload as quickly as possible. But don't feel bad for EVGA or the other AIC partners, because they made out like bandits throughout all of 2020 and 2021!

As far as the RTX 3090 Ti specifications, this is the fully enabled GA102 chip, the top of the Ampere architecture. It's interesting to compare this chip with the RTX 4090 specifications, to see how much things have changed. Note that the die size on GA102 is slightly larger than the new AD102, and yet AD102 packs nearly three times as many transistors. That's all thanks to the move from Samsung 8N ("8nm Nvidia") that was really just a tweaked version of Samsung's 10nm process, over to TSMC 4N ("4nm Nvidia") that's a tweaked variant of TSMC's 5nm N5 process. Obviously, the latter offers significantly higher transistor density.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Specifications
Architecture	GA102
Process Technology	Samsung 8N
Transistors (Billion)	28.3
Die size (mm^2)	628.4
Streaming Multiprocessors	84
GPU Cores (Shaders)	10752
Tensor Cores	336
RT Cores	84
Boost Clock (MHz)	1860
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	21
VRAM (GB)	24
VRAM Bus Width	384
L2 Cache	6
Render Outputs	112
Texture Mapping Units	336
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	40.0
FP16 TFLOPS (Sparsity)	160 (320)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	1008
Total Board Power (Watts)	450
Launch Date	March 29, 2022
Launch Price	$1,999

The maxed out Ampere chip in the RTX 3090 Ti has 84 SMs and 10,752 CUDA cores, along with 336 Tensor cores. Combined with clocks, the 3090 Ti offers up to 40 teraflops of FP32, or 320 teraflops of FP16. Unlike the new Ada Lovelace Tensor cores, there's no FP8 support, which means theoretical compute for AI workloads is about one-fourth of what the RTX 4090 can offer — not accounting for other architectural differences.

In order to try and differentiate the RTX 3090 Ti from the existing RTX 3090, Nvidia also bumped up the TBP (Total Board Power) by 100W, which allows the GPU to sustain substantially higher clocks compared to the 3090. It also allowed Nvidia and its partners a chance to test the waters for a 450W graphics card and pave the way for the 4090. Ironically, where the 12-pin and 16-pin adapters that came with RTX 3090 Ti cards all seemed to work fine, the new 4090 16-pin adapters appear to have used poor soldering that's prone to cracking and can cause a fire hazard. Oops.

The RTX 3090 Ti also uses new 2GB (16Gb) 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory, where the original RTX 3090 used 1GB (8Gb) 21 Gbps chips — this is the same 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory as the new RTX 4090, which means they have the same memory bandwidth. However, Ada cards have significantly larger L2 caches — 12X larger for the 4090 versus 3090 Ti — and that in turn means effective memory bandwidth is substantially improved. If the L2 cache hit rate on a 4090 for example is 60% at 4K, that means only 40% of memory accesses actually hit the GDDR6X memory, which means 2.5X more effective bandwidth. Nvidia has not detailed the actual L2 hit rates, which will vary by workload, but 50–70 percent seems likely.

At present, RTX 3090 Ti cards can be found starting at around $1,290 on Amazon. Considering the pending arrival of the GeForce RTX 4080, I can't help but think the RTX 3090 Ti represents a terrible value at this time — or actually any time since launch. At first it was far too expensive, but by the time Nvidia slashed prices and forced the AIC partners to do the same, Ada Lovelace was right around the corner and there was no reason to even consider buying a 3090 Ti. It's generally the fastest graphics card from the Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 era — at least at 4K and in professional workloads — but it arrived too late, provided too little of a performance uplift (only about 10% faster than the 3090), and also required substantially more power.

If you're even thinking about buying an RTX 3090 Ti card, used or otherwise, you should instead look at the RTX 4090. Well, unless you can pick one up for under $700. And don't forget that RTX 4070 is also on the way.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Specifications

It's hard to believe that Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 has been around for over two years now, though it has now been displaced by the new RTX 4090. You can see where the RTX 3090 ranks among other cards in our GPU performance hierarchy.

Originally launched in September 2020 alongside the RTX 3080, people complained about the price — how it was a Titan-class price without the Titan-class features like improved professional application drivers and support. And then the cryptocurrency mining boom of 2020 through 2022 hit, and suddenly $1,500 for an RTX 3090 that could potentially earn (at its highest point) over $30 per day seemed like a steal.

Naturally, prices shot up to compensate, scalpers got super involved with graphics cards, and the rest is sort of history. Painful history, at least for gaming enthusiasts — miners loved the RTX 3090. This was the fastest consumer graphics card throughout 2021, packed with features to make 4K gaming truly viable. And yet most of these cards probably spent all of 2021 chipping away in the Ethereum mines. RIP, Ethereum mining! But let's look at the specifications.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Specifications
Architecture	GA102
Process Technology	Samsung 8N
Transistors (Billion)	28.3
Die size (mm^2)	628.4
Streaming Multiprocessors	82
GPU Cores (Shaders)	10496
Tensor Cores	328
RT Cores	82
Boost Clock (MHz)	1695
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	19.5
VRAM (GB)	24
VRAM Bus Width	384
L2 Cache	6
Render Outputs	112
Texture Mapping Units	328
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	35.6
FP16 TFLOPS (Sparsity)	142 (285)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	936
Total Board Power (Watts)	350
Launch Date	September 24, 2020
Launch Price	$1,499

RTX 3090 uses the same GA102 chip as several other Nvidia GPUs — RTX 3080, RTX 3080 12GB, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3090 Ti are all based off GA102. Back in 2020, there probably weren't that many nearly fully functional GA102 chips available, so supplies of the 3090 were quite limited and Nvidia pushed the narrative that these were "professional cards, not just for gamers." That's despite having GeForce branding right in the card name, so you can guess how well received such claims were.

With 82 of the available 84 SMs enabled, and the full 384-bit memory interface matched up with 24 1GB GDDR6X chips, this was a beast of a card. Power consumption on the reference model was rated at 350W, but third-party AIC vendors pushed things well into the 400W and higher range on factory overclocked cards.

One of the big issues with the RTX 3090, particularly for cryptocurrency miners, is that the GDDR6X chips ran hot. Fire up Ethereum mining and many 3090 cards, including the Founders Edition, would quickly reach 110C on the memory before starting to throttle. Dismantling the cards to replace the original thermal pads with better variants was common, and even in gaming workloads you could easily hit more than 100C on the memory.

The root of the problem was that, because Micron was only making 1GB (8Gb) capacity GDDR6X chips at the time, the RTX 3090 required half of the 24 chips to reside on the back of the PCB, while the other half were on the same side as the GPU. Take a look at that chunky Founders Edition up top: It has a chunky a triple-slot cooler to help keep all the chips cool... except that's only for the "front" of the PCB; the back of the PCB just has a metal cover with thermal pads and no active cooling. I can state from experience that the back of the card — with the RTX 3090 logo seen above, which usually faces upwards in most computer cases —can get extremely toasty under load!

Theoretical compute performance for the RTX 3090 tips the scales at 35.6 teraflops, and the Tensor cores can do up to 285 teraflops of FP16 with sparsity enabled. All of that number crunching prowess is put to good use in ray tracing games, and Nvidia's DLSS feature can leverage the Tensor cores to help with image upscaling that looks almost as good as native, at least in Quality mode. Almost all of the most demanding ray tracing games support DLSS, though, which actually brings 4K gaming into reach.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Specifications

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the "poor man's" take on the RTX 3090. For gaming purposes, it delivers very similar performance as very few games actually use more than 12GB of VRAM. It uses the same GA102 GPU, only with 80 SMs instead of the 82 enabled in the RTX 3090. It also uses twelve 1GB (8Gb) GDDR6X memory chips rated for 19 Gbps. You can see where the RTX 3080 Ti ranks among other cards in our GPU performance hierarchy.

While the above image shows the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, that's a very poor choice of card for the 3080 Ti. It has the same basic size and cooling capabilities as the RTX 3080, but with more cores and higher clockspeeds plus more GDDR6X chips, it runs very hot and gets quite loud. I recommend looking at the various AIC (add-in card) partner offerings for better 3080 Ti models.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Specifications
Architecture	GA102
Process Technology	Samsung 8N
Transistors (Billion)	28.3
Die size (mm^2)	628.4
Streaming Multiprocessors	80
GPU Cores (Shaders)	10240
Tensor Cores	320
RT Cores	80
Boost Clock (MHz)	1665
VRAM Speed (Gbps)	19
VRAM (GB)	12
VRAM Bus Width	384
L2 Cache	6
Render Outputs	112
Texture Mapping Units	320
FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision)	34.1
FP16 TFLOPS (Sparsity)	136 (273)
Bandwidth (GB/s)	912
Total Board Power (Watts)	350
Launch Date	June 2, 2021
Launch Price	$1,199

Launched about nine months after the Ampere architecture first arrived, the RTX 3080 Ti likely would have replaced the RTX 3080 in pricing, or perhaps it would have cost a bit more. However, the cryptocurrency boom of 2021 was in full swing and every graphics card was sold out. Nvidia opted to use a recommended price of $1,199, but all the cards immediately sold out and ended up going for closer to $2,000 — this despite the implementation of Nvidia's Lite Hash Rate (LHR) anti-Ethereum limiter, version 2.

Thankfully, the GPU shortages are behind us, and with RTX 40-series cards now starting to arrive, Nvidia and its partners have a glut of high-end RTX 30-series cards to sell. RTX 3080 Ti models often sell below $1,000, and short-term sales have seen prices as low as $700. With the RTX 4080 slated to launch on November 16, and likely an RTX 4070 or similar arriving by January that will at least match the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti, I wouldn't spend a ton of money on this sort of card right now.

Nvidia "unlaunched" the RTX 4080 12GB, but the AD104 GPU used in that card will almost certainly arrive in an RTX 4070 or 4070 Ti in the next couple of months. Such a card shouldn't cost much more than $599, and leaked benchmarks of the canceled RTX 4080 12GB suggest it would be at least as fast as the 3080 Ti — plus with support for DLSS3, improved ray tracing hardware, and with lots of L2 cache to mitigate the relatively narrow memory bus.