NVIDIA has officially launched their GeForce RTX 3050 6GB graphics card today. This will be their new entry-level discrete graphics card. It is quite a different card than the original RTX 3050 that was launched back in January 2022 as a mid-range product. The original was based on the GA106 silicon that gave you 2,560 CUDA cores, 80 Tensor cores, 20 RT cores, 80 TMUs, and 32 ROPs as well as 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. Towards the end of 2022 NVIDIA made a change to the smaller GA107 silicon, which gave the card the same specifications, but gave the card some energy efficiency improvements.
With the new RTX 3050 6GB launching today, NVIDIA has made some significant changes, even though it is still based on the GA107 silicon. The first change is of course the memory, moving from 8GB to 6GB. The memory is the same 14 Gbps speed, but the card now features a narrower memory bus of only 96-bit. This gives you a total of 168 GB/s of memory bandwidth. On top of the memory change the GPU has been cut-down as well. You are only getting 16 SMs enabled instead of the 20 that were on the original RTX 3050. This configuration will give you 2,048 CUDA cores, 64 Tensor cores, 16 RT cores, 64 TMUs, and 32 ROPs.
NVIDIA has clocked the card lower as well at only 1470 MHz boost instead of the 1777 MHz of the original. I guess the only good thing about these changes is that the card has a total graphics power (TGP) of only 70W. This means that you can completely power the card from your motherboard’s PCI-Express slot, so no need for any power connectors on these cards.
No word yet on official pricing, but NVIDIA’s MSRP is expected to be $179, which would put it in competition with Intel’s Arc A580.
