Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3060 last month, and today, the chipmaker has finally confirmed that it will be available on February 25.
At $329, the GeForce RTX 3060 would be the cheapest ray tracing graphics card in Nvidia's Ampere product stack. Historically, Nvidia's GeForce 60-series products have always provided the best bang for your buck. The GeForce GTX 1060, which debuted four years ago at $299, went on to become one of the most beloved graphics cards in the gaming circle. Steam's latest Hardware Survey showed that the GeForce RTX 1060 is still the most dominant graphics card on the platform with an impressive usage rate of 9.75%.
The $349 GeForce RTX 2060 is a compelling gaming graphics card, but it never received the same kind of love from gamers as the GeForce RTX 1060 did. With the GeForce RTX 3060, however, Nvidia hopes to recover gamers' favor. As we've known for a while now, there will not be a Founders Edition for the GeForce RTX 3060 (never mind the image up top), so gamers will have to get their fix from Nvidia's board partners. While Nvidia has insisted that we'll see the GeForce RTX 3060 at $329, we think the chipmaker's statement is over-optimistic, considering that the graphics card shortage has been plaguing the market for months now. We'll be lucky to find the GeForce RTX 3060 in stock at all, much less at Nvidia's MSRP.
Don't be despair if you can't get your hands on a GeForce RTX 3060 though. Nvidia has fired up its cooking oven to restock the market with GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards for those that want a much-needed upgrade. Well, if you think a two or four year old budget to mainstream GPU is an 'upgrade,' anyway.
