Earlier this month HEXUS reported upon the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB release date, and this has now been confirmed by Nvidia to The Verge. From 9am PT (5pm GMT) on Thursday 25th February, retailers will be allowed to sell the newest Ampere consumer graphics card.
Of course there is the thorny issue of stock being available when the RTX 3060 12GB is released. Already, at the pre-launch stage, you can see online listings featuring AIB partner cards based off this GPU being listed from €499 to €699 in Europe, and currently being sold in Pakistan for the equivalent of approx US$750. As a reminder, the official RRP is US$329.
There will not be any Founder's Edition of the RTX 3060 12GB graphics card, Nvidia told The Verge, so you will have to take your pick from AIB offerings, where available.
To recap, the RTX 3060 12GB is being touted by the Green Team as the successor to the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 (non-Super). Compared to these earlier generations the new consumer Ampere graphics card pretty much guarantees 60fps+ performance in modern AA games – and it does so with the dual delights of real-time ray tracing and DLSS turned on, where available.
GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti supply boost confirmed
To alleviate demand for PC gaming graphics cards, Nvidia has confirmed the rumours that it will be 'reviving' some older GPUs.
In an email to PC World, Nvidia said it had never EOLed the GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti, so 'reviving' was not perhaps the correct terminology. Instead, Nvidia said it preferred to say that it was meeting the "ebb and flow" of market demand which is currently very high.
The Pascal card's stock could potentially ramp up supply very quickly if the rumours that GDDR6 shortages are another reason behind shortages of the newest GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. Moreover, its 4GB GDDR5 VRAM, insufficient for ETH mining, means stocks won't be plundered, and it can run in systems which might not have a spare PCI power connector, as well as there being various LP designs ready for otherwise constrained systems. It looks like we still need some time for the ebb to turn into a flow of these 'revived' GPUs.