The entry-level price point is a bit lacking with team green especially more so following the discontinuation of the 16 series cards in Q1 of this year. To many enthusiasts, it feels as though NVIDIA have decided to place their focus mostly in the premium market leaving Intel and AMD to fight near the bottom for the best budget GPU, but new information suggest NVIDIA is still “trying” with the entry-level market.
NVIDIA RTX 3050 6GB In The Works
Currently NVIDIA’s cheapest graphics card is the RTX 3050 which launched for $249 and hasn’t really shifted much from that price point which leaves a gap in the sub $200 market. New information Via VideoCardz has suggested that this may soon be changing with the news that NVIDIA are preparing a 6GB variant of the RTX 3050 with reduced specs over its 8GB variant. It is said this card will feature fewer CUDA cores down from 2560 to 2304, a reduced 96-bit memory bus alongside its 6GB of GDDR6, lower clock speeds and a reduced TDP to reflect the reduced specs. Realistically, these specs tell me the more realistic name for this card would be RTX 3040 but we already saw what happened with the 4060(50).
- Cores: 2304
- Memory: 6GB GDDR6
- Bandwidth: 168 GB/s
- GPU Clocks: Base 1032 MHz / Boost 1470 MHz
- TDP: 70W
Of course reduced specs will, or at least should, mean a considerably reduced price especially for a last gen card. Ideally we would be looking at sub $200 which the current predictions of $179 reflect. It’s likely that this card will hold itself better than that useless GTX 1630, but it’s still an odd choice. I feel as though an RTX 4050 would be fairly solid in the budget market with the ability to support DLSS 3, but I don’t see that launching in the sub $200 market.
As for a release date, there is no concrete day but February 2024 is being pointed towards.
