NVIDIA has decided to stop production of the GeForce RTX 3060 video card. This model, although it belongs to the solutions of the previous generation, remains very popular among gamers.

 

For example, Steam statistics, almost 5.9% of users use GeForce RTX 3060. The official release of GeForce RTX 3060 12GB took place in February 2021, at the height of the “mining fever”. Due to high demand from miners, the video card immediately became scarce, and gamers managed to find it only after the demand for mining decreased. Later, NVIDIA released an 8-gigabyte version, which turned out to be less productive due to the use of a 128-bit memory bus.

 

Currently, NVIDIA has informed its partners AIB about the possibility to order GeForce RTX 3060 graphics processors for the last time. This means that the model will be completely discontinued in the near future. However, this does not mean that the video card will instantly disappear from store shelves. The process of selling out warehouse stocks will take some time. At the time when the GeForce RTX 3060 completely disappears from the market, it is likely that NVIDIA will introduce a new GeForce RTX 5060 model with the Blackwell architecture.

 

At one time, our Test Laboratory studied many video cards on base RTX 3060 impressions from one of them:

 

Previous tests of RTX 3000 series video cards have already shown that representatives of the new generation are much faster than their predecessors.

 

For example, the RTX 3080 outperforms the much more expensive (by MSRP) RTX 2080 Ti, the RTX 3070 outperforms the RTX 2080 Super…

 

What about the RTX 3060?

 

The RTX 3060 is roughly equivalent to the RTX 2070.

 

The large volume of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 video memory in 12 GB will surely please those who use the video card in video processing, in applications with complex rendering, etc.

 

But so far it cannot be said that 12 GB of video memory gives a tangible advantage in games. However, this is a good investment for the future. Games are becoming increasingly voracious in terms of video memory requirements.

 

On the Internet, you can find a lot of negativity about the RTX 3060 compared to other RTX 3000 series graphics cards.

 

Most often, this is due to the fact that NVIDIA somehow greatly reduced it compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, and the difference in the price (declared) turned out not to be that big.

 

In the “dreams of gamers”, RTX 3060 should be called rather RTX 3050 Ti and cost around $250.

 

If we talk about reality, then, as we already wrote in video card tests earlier, while the payback period of a graphics card in mining is calculated in months, not years, video cards at prices close to those recommended for sale cannot be expected.

 

Yes, NVIDIA has artificially made the RTX 3060 less attractive to cryptocurrency miners, but the demand from buyers is still high.