The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti represents a new tier in Nvidia's range of GPUs — or alternatively, it's a replacement for the RTX 2060 Super tier. You can check our GPU performance hierarchy to see where it lands, but the short summary is that it's only about 8% slower than the RTX 3070.
The odd thing about the 2060 Super comparison is that the various 20-series Super cards were a refresh that occurred roughly a year after the initial 20-series launch. The 30-series Ti cards are mostly refreshes of existing cards as well — RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti came out around 10 months after the non-Ti versions first appeared, while the RTX 3090 Ti came out 18 months after the RTX 3090. The 3060 Ti was basically a way to stretch out the range of performance offered by Nvidia's Ampere GPUs compared to Turing.
Did that 'experiment' on naming work out well for Nvidia? We don't really know, and all the stats on sales and prices from the 30-series are borked thanks to cryptocurrency mining. The 3060 Ti was basically the same mining performance as the RTX 3070, since they both use 8GB of GDDR6 memory, so both ended up selling in the $1,000–$1,200 range through most of 2021. That was up to triple the recommended price!
RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 are here or at least on the way, and there will be an RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 as well. But will there be Ti, Super, or some other name for in-between cards? And will those cards launch alongside the vanilla versions, or will they be the one year later refreshes like we've seen in the past? We'll find out in the coming months.
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Specifications |
|---|
| Architecture | GA104 |
| Process Technology | Samsung 8N |
| Transistors (Billion) | 17.4 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 392.5 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 38 |
| GPU Cores (Shaders) | 4864 |
| Tensor Cores | 152 |
| RT Cores | 38 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 1665 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 14 |
| VRAM (GB) | 8 |
| VRAM Bus Width | 256 |
| L2 Cache | 4 |
| Render Outputs | 80 |
| Texture Mapping Units | 152 |
| FP32 TFLOPS (Single-Precision) | 16.2 |
| FP16 TFLOPS (Sparsity) | 65 (130) |
| Bandwidth (GB/s) | 448 |
| Total Board Power (Watts) | 200 |
| Launch Date | December 2, 2020 |
| Launch Price | $399 |
We talked about the upward creep in generational pricing tiers in our RTX 3070 overview. With RTX 3060 Ti, this was sort of the "real" 70-class replacement if we go back to the GTX 1070 era. (The RTX 2070/2070 Super already pushed the 70-class into the $500 range.) The RTX 3060 Ti uses the same GA104 chip as the 3070, and it has the same amount of memory, so the cost for the hardware is pretty much identical. That means Nvidia makes money selling GA104-based cards for $399, so the 3070 is just an extra $100 in pure profit on some levels (spread among Nvidia, AIC partners, distributors, and retailers).
Besides reducing the SM count down to 38 (from 46 on the 3070), the only other significant change was the drop in power from 220W to 200W. The official boost clock is also 60 MHz slower, but in practice that hardly matters. Running some gaming tests as an example, the 3070 Founders Edition clocked at 1863 MHz while the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition clocked at 1900 MHz on average. Yes, you got that right: The theoretically lower clocked part hit higher boost clocks under real-world testing.
Which is where the upcoming RTX 40-series parts are very interesting. Let's quickly look at the past several generations of architectures. Starting with the GTX 900-series, Nvidia's Maxwell architecture only had average clocks of around 1,210 MHz (for reference cards where possible). Nvidia's GTX 10-series Pascal architecture bumped that up a lot, with average gaming clock in the 1,800 MHz range. Turing RTX 20- and GTX 16-series GPUs barely changed things, averaging 1,870 MHz. Ampere RTX 30-series was a similar story, with a relatively minor speed bump up to 1,900 MHz.
Now look at the RTX 40-series. Advertised boost clocks so far are in the 2.5–2.6 GHz range, while real-world clocks on the RTX 4090 Founders Edition are above 2,700 MHz. Imagine an RTX 4060 with a few more GPU shaders and SMs, clocked 40% higher than the 3060 Ti. We'd be looking at a 50% generational boost in performance. Or in other words, there's a good reason to wait rather than trying to pick up an RTX 3060 Ti at this late stage in its life cycle.
