Post by account_disabled on Feb 18, 2024 9:29:19 GMT
Nvidia launched three new GPUs last month, part of a super overhaul of the RTX 40 series designed to improve the value of the company's $600-plus graphics cards. But today, the company is quietly doing something it hasn't done in over four years: releasing a sub-$200 graphics card. As spotted by TechPowerUp, Nvidia partners like Gigabyte have started officially announcing a 6GB version of the aging RTX 3050 graphics card, albeit with less memory and memory bandwidth, fewer CUDA cores, and lower power requirements. The announcement follows a few days of leaked retail listings, which generally point to an MSRP of about $179 for the new and old card. This would make it Nvidia's first sub-$200 graphics card release since the GeForce GTX 1650 Super came out in late 2019, a four-year gap caused in part by a GPU shortage fueled by cryptocurrencies and pa nor the 6GB version . The version is reduced further. Its 6 GB of memory is connected to a narrow 96-bit memory bus. And while reports differ on exactly how many CUDA cores we can expect (TechPowerUp and Tom's Hardware say 2,048, while Gigabyte's 6GB 3050 product pages list 2,304), it's clear that there are fewer than in the original RTX 3050, and its clock speed is lower than boot.
These specs should make it a good card for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings, depending on the game. It should also be a good choice for small form factor systems (one of Gigabyte's versions is a low-profile card suitable for many office desktops) and its 70W power requirement should mean the cards can draw all the energy they need. the PCI Express slot, without the need for an external power connector. Announcement As a stripped-down version of a 2-year-old America Mobile Number List card based on a 3.5-year-old next-gen GPU architecture, the RTX 3050 isn't very exciting. But it gets more interesting once you consider that Nvidia's partners are currently selling the old non-Super version of the GTX 1650 for around the same price. It's hard to predict how much the narrower memory bus will affect the 6GB 3050's performance, but compared to the 1650, it has a significantly larger number of newer CUDA cores, ray tracing support, another 2GB of RAM, GDDR6 instead of GDDR5 and support for Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology (although not DLSS Frame Generation, which remains exclusive to the 40 series).
The new card also complicates one of AMD's selling points for its new Ryzen 8000G processors, which include reasonably capable 1080p integrated GPUs. AMD compared the cost of a $329 Ryzen 7 8700G favorably to the cost of a Core i5 CPU and GTX 1650 GPU, which offer similar performance for more money. But the RTX 3050 should decisively outperform the 8700G, and AMD's price argument was already being undermined by the additional expense of socket AM5 motherboards and DDR5 memory. As nice as it is to see at least some life twitch in the entry-level GPU market, we're still a long way from where we were in the mid-to-late 2010s, when sub-$200 cards like the GTX 1050 Ti and 1650 were launched shortly after each other. Cards from the same series and used the newest GPU architectures available at the time. There is a laptop GPU in the RTX 4050 series, but a desktop version seems highly unlikely at this point, let alone a $200 or less desktop version. But a late, boring improvement is still an improvement.
These specs should make it a good card for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings, depending on the game. It should also be a good choice for small form factor systems (one of Gigabyte's versions is a low-profile card suitable for many office desktops) and its 70W power requirement should mean the cards can draw all the energy they need. the PCI Express slot, without the need for an external power connector. Announcement As a stripped-down version of a 2-year-old America Mobile Number List card based on a 3.5-year-old next-gen GPU architecture, the RTX 3050 isn't very exciting. But it gets more interesting once you consider that Nvidia's partners are currently selling the old non-Super version of the GTX 1650 for around the same price. It's hard to predict how much the narrower memory bus will affect the 6GB 3050's performance, but compared to the 1650, it has a significantly larger number of newer CUDA cores, ray tracing support, another 2GB of RAM, GDDR6 instead of GDDR5 and support for Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology (although not DLSS Frame Generation, which remains exclusive to the 40 series).
The new card also complicates one of AMD's selling points for its new Ryzen 8000G processors, which include reasonably capable 1080p integrated GPUs. AMD compared the cost of a $329 Ryzen 7 8700G favorably to the cost of a Core i5 CPU and GTX 1650 GPU, which offer similar performance for more money. But the RTX 3050 should decisively outperform the 8700G, and AMD's price argument was already being undermined by the additional expense of socket AM5 motherboards and DDR5 memory. As nice as it is to see at least some life twitch in the entry-level GPU market, we're still a long way from where we were in the mid-to-late 2010s, when sub-$200 cards like the GTX 1050 Ti and 1650 were launched shortly after each other. Cards from the same series and used the newest GPU architectures available at the time. There is a laptop GPU in the RTX 4050 series, but a desktop version seems highly unlikely at this point, let alone a $200 or less desktop version. But a late, boring improvement is still an improvement.