The mention of the RTX 3050 is not really a surprise for those who follow Nvidia. In fact, the RTX 3050 and 3050 ti are two cards on which Nvidia has communicated its plans to its partners since January of this year. Breakages and production problems forced Nvidia to suspend the release of these cards on desktop.
According to the latest rumors the internal reference PG190 SKU 70 would be the RTX 3050 with the GA106-150 GPU. So far, rumors have mentioned this GPU only for the RTX 3050 Ti, but according to the source of Videocardz, it is in fact the non-Ti model. This model is expected to feature 8GB of memory.
The end of GTX?
Now we have to wonder about the positioning of this card, which should have higher performance than the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER, but still lower than the RTX 2060 12GB, which will be launched on December 7. If this positioning were to be confirmed, we could simply assume that Nvidia no longer wishes to offer GTX cards in the near future. The logic of this card would therefore be to compete with a future RX 6500XT which should be launched in the first quarter of 2022. At the same time, an Intel Arc A128 card (the name has not yet been revealed) should also arrive in this segment in the second quarter.
RTX 3050: finally “low budget” cards?
It remains to be seen when this RTX 3050 series will be launched on the market. NVIDIA plans to make announcements about future RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 3080 12GB and RTX 3070 Ti 16GB in the coming days with a launch early next year (CES 2022). If this 3050 could be evoked, it should be in reality on the market (if it really arrives one day) that at best on the second quarter. We wonder what would push Nvidia to “occupy” its production capacities with cheap cards at the expense of the big RTX that have been selling effortlessly for a few months. Maybe the competition has understood this situation well…
