The NVIDIA 3060 Ti: A New Era of Mid-Range Graphics Cards

In recent times, the market for graphics cards has been plagued by high demand and limited supply, leading to a shortage that has affected gamers and computer enthusiasts worldwide. The NVIDIA 3060 Ti is one such card that has been at the center of attention, with many wondering if it's worth the hype. To answer this question, we need to delve into the details of what makes the 3060 Ti tick.

In fact, the PCB on the 3060 Ti is identical to a 30-70, which is a completely different GPU from NVIDIA's new mid-range lineup. This means that the 3060 Ti is not just a minor iteration, but rather a significant upgrade to the previous generation of mid-range graphics cards. The 3080 and 3090 are also part of this new architecture, with the 30-90 being the same core as the 3090, making them identical in terms of performance.

However, the 3060 Ti is the first GPU in NVIDIA's new mid-range lineup, which suggests that it may be a slightly different beast from its peers. With eight nanometer Samsung manufacturing, this card is expected to offer improved performance and power efficiency compared to previous generations. The 30-50 Ti or 3050 could potentially be a shade version of the GA106 architecture, which isn't terrible by any means.

Rumors have been circulating about NVIDIA potentially moving its architecture back to TSMC's seven nanometer process, but at this point, nothing is confirmed. The industry is currently facing a perfect storm of high demand and limited supply, making it difficult for companies to keep up with the pace. This has resulted in delayed deliveries and limited availability of graphics cards, including the 3060 Ti.

NVIDIA recently addressed the concerns about supply and demand during their keynote at CES, stating that they have manufactured more cards this generation than last, doubling the production of previous years. However, despite this, the demand for graphics cards remains higher than ever, making it challenging for NVIDIA to meet the demand. The company expects the thin allocation to maintain through Q1 of 2021, but it's unclear how long this will continue.

Another factor contributing to the high prices and limited availability of graphics cards is the surge in Bitcoin prices. As the cryptocurrency market continues to fluctuate, so too does the mining industry, which has led to a renewed demand for graphics cards. This is reminiscent of the mining craze that occurred back in 2015-2016, which caused widespread shortages of graphics cards.

The NVIDIA 3060 Ti has received mixed reviews from some content creators, who have expressed disappointment at its performance compared to previous generations. However, this author firmly disagrees with such statements, as the 3060 Ti offers significant improvements over its predecessor, even if it doesn't quite live up to the hype. With all these factors in play, getting your hands on an NVIDIA 3060 Ti might be a challenge.

In addition to the desktop market, NVIDIA is also launching 30-series graphics cards on laptops, which will likely receive limited allocations as well. The company has been tight-lipped about their plans for mid-range AMD RDNA 2 cards, which have sparked widespread speculation among enthusiasts. Unfortunately, NVIDIA's keynote at CES was more like a snooze fest than an exciting reveal.

So, will you be waiting for AMD's mid-range card or trying to get your hands on an NVIDIA 3060 Ti? The choice is yours. Sound off in the comments below and let us know how you plan to approach this GPU shortage. As always, we'll see you guys in the next article.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys js2 here and i'm back kind of with the talking head about some stuff being launched at ces 2021 which again i said before and i'll say it again this doesn't really feel like ces but i digress we're going to talk about the rtx 3060 today not the 3060 ti the 30 60. the all-new pure loop liquid all-in-one water cooling unit features a doubly decoupled inline water pump for reduced vibration and noise while the pure wings 2 fans provide ultra silent operation available in multiple radiator sizes the pure loop is the price conscious choice for your next build to learn more click the be quiet link below so precariously precariously whatever ironically just it wasn't a real nvidia keynote there were no spatulas involved or leather jackets or rich mahogany or overdone kitchens but we do have here is a new flagship in terms of the affordable model of nvidia's lineup of graphics cards the 60 series cards has always been the most center mass targeted graphics card aimed at giving you the most performance for the most value and although they do in the past have 50 models and 50 ti models the 60 model not the ti or the super is just the plain 60 has always been the go-to in terms of just the most for your money the 1060 pascal card being nvidia's all-time most popular graphics card they've ever made in terms of sales so the 30-60s design really targeted towards those folks that are still floating around on pascal to consider that it's time to upgrade not so much those that are maybe running a 2060 because uh the upgrade from obviously touring architecture to ampere architecture is is great but the jump from pascal to ampere is like we've seen kind of through the product stack from the 80 series down is just a really good jump given the actual price reduction we're seeing reduction yes i'm well aware what i just said we speak in msrp because that's the way that the manufacturers advertise it what the retailers do is an entirely different story a story of uh sadness and despair but i digress again there's actually price reduction this time so the 60 series model in the 1060 launched at uh 299 dollars for the founders and 249 dollars for the msrp now those are the basic cards like the ones that we've brought out before that have like a single fan and only have like a single six pin header and whatnot um when we moved to the 2060 though the 20 series card is what gave people a a bad taste because we saw with touring a massive jump in pricing across the board where the 2060 was coming in at about 349 dollars i mean we're talking a 100 jump over msrp at the same tier now whether or not people bought into it at the time when 20 series first launched we had the introduction of the rt cores we had the introduction of the tensor cores you know dlss those cores not having a whole lot to do back then are actually doing quite a bit today with dlss being available in many new titles we're seeing the rtx 3060 launch launch at an msrp of 329. so we're seeing a 20 reduction and a very strong generational bump in performance over the 2016. now let's talk about the specs here we're going to compare it to the rtx 3060 ti and the reason why i'm doing that is because usually we would see nvidia launch the non-ti models first and then the ti model later kind of splitting the distance between the 60 and the 70 series card although this time i think because of the threat of what amd's radeon team has been able to do um with our dna 2. 2.0 our dna ii uh i think that they were kind of preemptively just sort of starting at the top and working their way down including the ti model in between the 70 and the 60. but we've got 3580 cuda cores or 84 cuda cores versus the rtx 2060s 1920. now one of the reasons that we're seeing that and i feel like there's an asterisk that's probably necessary here is if the architecture and and remember this is there was a lot of high-level information here there's still some gaps we don't have full-on information on yet that we haven't had our press day i'm this is the same information that the public saw we didn't have early access information like we often would get i think with everything going on with the video lately and the battle between nvidia and content creators with them trying to silence uh unboxed hardware or hardware unboxed um i think right now they just kind of like kept this to themselves which is probably the right move they haven't told us a whole lot about the architecture but if it's if it's similar to the core architecture we've seen with like 30 80 30 90 30 70 there's almost like a hyper threading kind of an aspect to the way the cuda cores work it's not actually hyper threading but it's sort of similar-ish in a way where it makes the core counts quite high but it's also kind of a split workload so it's one thing to keep in mind i don't know if this is 3584 physical cuda cores versus uh you know the previous gen or whether or not they are um simulated cores and or just effective logical cores the rops guessing at 64. whereas 48 on the 2060 and 80 on the 360 ti i forgot to mention there's 4 864 cuda cores on the 3060 ti so you can see how previous gen 1920 versus 35 84 and 4864 is gonna be a jump in pretty much any title that utilizes uh cuda obviously but the boost clock it's actually a higher boost clock on the 30 60 at 1.78 gigahertz versus 1.6 gigahertz on the 3060 ti 14 gigabit per second on gddr6 on the 360 ti we don't know what's going to be on 30 60 we're guessing maybe 14. it's 192 bit memory bus versus 256 on the 360 ti so this is where you start to see where some of the cost was saved and where some of the changes were made in the architecture is specifically with the memory bus curiously enough though the 36 dti has eight gigabytes of gddr6 whereas there are 12 gigabytes on the 3060. and i think that's more of a marketing thing because there's no way you're going to be able to push the types of resolution that you would need 12 gigabytes for with the power that you typically get in a 60 series card aka 4k or you know 8k is not going to happen on a 60 series card period not in probably the next five years even but 12 gigabytes makes a really good marketing number because of the fact that radeon has been known to put 16 gigabytes in all their cards so far like or that we've seen with rdna too and if they start to keep that trend alive with their lower series cards they're gonna have to have a higher memory count uh or vram count with their lower series cards for nvidia just to seem competitive although it's kind of an arbitrary number in that if you can't fill the memory buffer and refresh it fast enough with the amount of performance that you're getting anyway having all that extra memory really doesn't do anything for you in terms of gaming but it could potentially give you some available workload for professional workloads and stuff where you need more than the eight gigabytes you're going gonna find on the 360 ti but i digress a third time in this video in that i think most people looking for workstation cards are not going to be shopping for a 30 60 to begin with might even be more prudent to find yourself an older higher series card that has better cuda performance and floating floating point performance than something you'd find on like a 60 series card it is a 170 watt part though that's actually up 10 watts from last gen last gen was 160 watts now we're up to 170. a nominal 10 watt improvement over previous generation doesn't seem bad considering the fact that we know we're getting a fairly significant bump in performance i think that's a trade-off that's worth it one thing worth noting though this is ga 106 core so unlike the 3060 ti where it was ga 104 which is a shave down 30 70. it in fact even the pcb on the 3060 ti is identical to a 30 70. this is a completely different gpu this is the first gpu in its more entry-level mid-range lineup from nvidia than continuing the trend of shaved down architectures whereas the 3080 and 30 90 are the same core 38 is very shaved versus 3090 30 70 360 ti are the identical core identical pcb 3060 is the first of a new pcb so we could expect a 30 50 ti maybe or 3050 to be a shade version of ga106 which isn't terrible they are all running eight nanometer samsung there are those rumors though of nvidia potentially moving architecture back to tsmc uh potentially being a seven nanometer and now we don't know yet what's happening with that everything as you might expect is completely upside down and it's so interesting to see uh you know with with demand not being able to be met because let's this is a this is a multiple pronged pitchfork in what's happening with the industry right now demand is higher than it's ever been manufacturing is going as fast as it's ever gone but it's not enough because so many people right now are trying to buy and build and upgrade computers at the same time it definitely looks like these companies are not coming out with products however the story they tell is that they're manufacturing it physically as fast as they can however demand is absolutely unprecedented but availability is looking to be february of 2021. i got a little bit of an update here too to talk about with nvidia's availability with graphics cards because one of the things that both nvidia and amd did do at ces was publicly address the concerns about supply and demand which is something nvidia has been very quiet about in fact nvidia has been very adamant that they've been meeting demand that they've been manufacturing more cards than they've ever had at any launch ever and and i think it's hard for people to swallow that pill whether it's the truth or not i think people don't believe it because you can't just go online and buy one so therefore people like to just assume that there was never any cards available nvidia states that they have manufactured more cards this generation than last generation by as much as double and it's not been enough to meet the demand i think there's more than twice the demand there was last year however they do say they expect the thin allocation to maintain through q1 of 2021 not q1 of the calendar q1 of their fiscal year which actually goes through april so you could probably expect four more months before things start to seem like they're normalizing and another aspect of what's causing price to go up and availability to stay low is the fact that bitcoin is about as high as it's ever been and that alone is also making people start to mine once again the mining craze was what caused us our initial just disaster for graphics card availability back in 2015 2016 and now that we're seeing like the second major wave of bitcoin craves you can expect this to probably continue so this was an information informational piece to kind of give you some stuff of what to expect with 30 60 generational improvement over the 2060 absolutely hands down i saw some stuff online of of some other content creators actually being somewhat disappointed with this saying it was a pointless i don't agree with that whatsoever if if you were able to get what they're showing here on paper for 20 less than what you got for the same price last year that's a win if you can actually get it and with all those things i just said happening in the world right now i think you have a better chance of winning the lottery of getting a 30 series card and then they're also launching 30 series on notebooks which we plan on talking about and getting our hands on as well because that's the next thing we've all seen the allocation of the 30 series silicon has to go somewhere and laptops is another one of them so anyway there you go guys the rtx 3060 are you interested in buying it does it incentivize you to want to get it or are you gonna wait and see what sort of mid-range card amd has amd had its keynote and we kind of hope to see and learn some stuff about maybe mid-range amd rdna 2 cards unfortunately no it was nothing more than a white noise to fall asleep to during that keynote because it was probably one of the most boring things i think any of us have ever watched are you going to wait for amd's mid-range card or are you going to try and get your hands on an rtx 3060 come february sound off in the comments below and as always i'll see you guys in the next onewhat's up guys js2 here and i'm back kind of with the talking head about some stuff being launched at ces 2021 which again i said before and i'll say it again this doesn't really feel like ces but i digress we're going to talk about the rtx 3060 today not the 3060 ti the 30 60. the all-new pure loop liquid all-in-one water cooling unit features a doubly decoupled inline water pump for reduced vibration and noise while the pure wings 2 fans provide ultra silent operation available in multiple radiator sizes the pure loop is the price conscious choice for your next build to learn more click the be quiet link below so precariously precariously whatever ironically just it wasn't a real nvidia keynote there were no spatulas involved or leather jackets or rich mahogany or overdone kitchens but we do have here is a new flagship in terms of the affordable model of nvidia's lineup of graphics cards the 60 series cards has always been the most center mass targeted graphics card aimed at giving you the most performance for the most value and although they do in the past have 50 models and 50 ti models the 60 model not the ti or the super is just the plain 60 has always been the go-to in terms of just the most for your money the 1060 pascal card being nvidia's all-time most popular graphics card they've ever made in terms of sales so the 30-60s design really targeted towards those folks that are still floating around on pascal to consider that it's time to upgrade not so much those that are maybe running a 2060 because uh the upgrade from obviously touring architecture to ampere architecture is is great but the jump from pascal to ampere is like we've seen kind of through the product stack from the 80 series down is just a really good jump given the actual price reduction we're seeing reduction yes i'm well aware what i just said we speak in msrp because that's the way that the manufacturers advertise it what the retailers do is an entirely different story a story of uh sadness and despair but i digress again there's actually price reduction this time so the 60 series model in the 1060 launched at uh 299 dollars for the founders and 249 dollars for the msrp now those are the basic cards like the ones that we've brought out before that have like a single fan and only have like a single six pin header and whatnot um when we moved to the 2060 though the 20 series card is what gave people a a bad taste because we saw with touring a massive jump in pricing across the board where the 2060 was coming in at about 349 dollars i mean we're talking a 100 jump over msrp at the same tier now whether or not people bought into it at the time when 20 series first launched we had the introduction of the rt cores we had the introduction of the tensor cores you know dlss those cores not having a whole lot to do back then are actually doing quite a bit today with dlss being available in many new titles we're seeing the rtx 3060 launch launch at an msrp of 329. so we're seeing a 20 reduction and a very strong generational bump in performance over the 2016. now let's talk about the specs here we're going to compare it to the rtx 3060 ti and the reason why i'm doing that is because usually we would see nvidia launch the non-ti models first and then the ti model later kind of splitting the distance between the 60 and the 70 series card although this time i think because of the threat of what amd's radeon team has been able to do um with our dna 2. 2.0 our dna ii uh i think that they were kind of preemptively just sort of starting at the top and working their way down including the ti model in between the 70 and the 60. but we've got 3580 cuda cores or 84 cuda cores versus the rtx 2060s 1920. now one of the reasons that we're seeing that and i feel like there's an asterisk that's probably necessary here is if the architecture and and remember this is there was a lot of high-level information here there's still some gaps we don't have full-on information on yet that we haven't had our press day i'm this is the same information that the public saw we didn't have early access information like we often would get i think with everything going on with the video lately and the battle between nvidia and content creators with them trying to silence uh unboxed hardware or hardware unboxed um i think right now they just kind of like kept this to themselves which is probably the right move they haven't told us a whole lot about the architecture but if it's if it's similar to the core architecture we've seen with like 30 80 30 90 30 70 there's almost like a hyper threading kind of an aspect to the way the cuda cores work it's not actually hyper threading but it's sort of similar-ish in a way where it makes the core counts quite high but it's also kind of a split workload so it's one thing to keep in mind i don't know if this is 3584 physical cuda cores versus uh you know the previous gen or whether or not they are um simulated cores and or just effective logical cores the rops guessing at 64. whereas 48 on the 2060 and 80 on the 360 ti i forgot to mention there's 4 864 cuda cores on the 3060 ti so you can see how previous gen 1920 versus 35 84 and 4864 is gonna be a jump in pretty much any title that utilizes uh cuda obviously but the boost clock it's actually a higher boost clock on the 30 60 at 1.78 gigahertz versus 1.6 gigahertz on the 3060 ti 14 gigabit per second on gddr6 on the 360 ti we don't know what's going to be on 30 60 we're guessing maybe 14. it's 192 bit memory bus versus 256 on the 360 ti so this is where you start to see where some of the cost was saved and where some of the changes were made in the architecture is specifically with the memory bus curiously enough though the 36 dti has eight gigabytes of gddr6 whereas there are 12 gigabytes on the 3060. and i think that's more of a marketing thing because there's no way you're going to be able to push the types of resolution that you would need 12 gigabytes for with the power that you typically get in a 60 series card aka 4k or you know 8k is not going to happen on a 60 series card period not in probably the next five years even but 12 gigabytes makes a really good marketing number because of the fact that radeon has been known to put 16 gigabytes in all their cards so far like or that we've seen with rdna too and if they start to keep that trend alive with their lower series cards they're gonna have to have a higher memory count uh or vram count with their lower series cards for nvidia just to seem competitive although it's kind of an arbitrary number in that if you can't fill the memory buffer and refresh it fast enough with the amount of performance that you're getting anyway having all that extra memory really doesn't do anything for you in terms of gaming but it could potentially give you some available workload for professional workloads and stuff where you need more than the eight gigabytes you're going gonna find on the 360 ti but i digress a third time in this video in that i think most people looking for workstation cards are not going to be shopping for a 30 60 to begin with might even be more prudent to find yourself an older higher series card that has better cuda performance and floating floating point performance than something you'd find on like a 60 series card it is a 170 watt part though that's actually up 10 watts from last gen last gen was 160 watts now we're up to 170. a nominal 10 watt improvement over previous generation doesn't seem bad considering the fact that we know we're getting a fairly significant bump in performance i think that's a trade-off that's worth it one thing worth noting though this is ga 106 core so unlike the 3060 ti where it was ga 104 which is a shave down 30 70. it in fact even the pcb on the 3060 ti is identical to a 30 70. this is a completely different gpu this is the first gpu in its more entry-level mid-range lineup from nvidia than continuing the trend of shaved down architectures whereas the 3080 and 30 90 are the same core 38 is very shaved versus 3090 30 70 360 ti are the identical core identical pcb 3060 is the first of a new pcb so we could expect a 30 50 ti maybe or 3050 to be a shade version of ga106 which isn't terrible they are all running eight nanometer samsung there are those rumors though of nvidia potentially moving architecture back to tsmc uh potentially being a seven nanometer and now we don't know yet what's happening with that everything as you might expect is completely upside down and it's so interesting to see uh you know with with demand not being able to be met because let's this is a this is a multiple pronged pitchfork in what's happening with the industry right now demand is higher than it's ever been manufacturing is going as fast as it's ever gone but it's not enough because so many people right now are trying to buy and build and upgrade computers at the same time it definitely looks like these companies are not coming out with products however the story they tell is that they're manufacturing it physically as fast as they can however demand is absolutely unprecedented but availability is looking to be february of 2021. i got a little bit of an update here too to talk about with nvidia's availability with graphics cards because one of the things that both nvidia and amd did do at ces was publicly address the concerns about supply and demand which is something nvidia has been very quiet about in fact nvidia has been very adamant that they've been meeting demand that they've been manufacturing more cards than they've ever had at any launch ever and and i think it's hard for people to swallow that pill whether it's the truth or not i think people don't believe it because you can't just go online and buy one so therefore people like to just assume that there was never any cards available nvidia states that they have manufactured more cards this generation than last generation by as much as double and it's not been enough to meet the demand i think there's more than twice the demand there was last year however they do say they expect the thin allocation to maintain through q1 of 2021 not q1 of the calendar q1 of their fiscal year which actually goes through april so you could probably expect four more months before things start to seem like they're normalizing and another aspect of what's causing price to go up and availability to stay low is the fact that bitcoin is about as high as it's ever been and that alone is also making people start to mine once again the mining craze was what caused us our initial just disaster for graphics card availability back in 2015 2016 and now that we're seeing like the second major wave of bitcoin craves you can expect this to probably continue so this was an information informational piece to kind of give you some stuff of what to expect with 30 60 generational improvement over the 2060 absolutely hands down i saw some stuff online of of some other content creators actually being somewhat disappointed with this saying it was a pointless i don't agree with that whatsoever if if you were able to get what they're showing here on paper for 20 less than what you got for the same price last year that's a win if you can actually get it and with all those things i just said happening in the world right now i think you have a better chance of winning the lottery of getting a 30 series card and then they're also launching 30 series on notebooks which we plan on talking about and getting our hands on as well because that's the next thing we've all seen the allocation of the 30 series silicon has to go somewhere and laptops is another one of them so anyway there you go guys the rtx 3060 are you interested in buying it does it incentivize you to want to get it or are you gonna wait and see what sort of mid-range card amd has amd had its keynote and we kind of hope to see and learn some stuff about maybe mid-range amd rdna 2 cards unfortunately no it was nothing more than a white noise to fall asleep to during that keynote because it was probably one of the most boring things i think any of us have ever watched are you going to wait for amd's mid-range card or are you going to try and get your hands on an rtx 3060 come february sound off in the comments below and as always i'll see you guys in the next one\n"