Alongside today's CES-centric announcement of their new GeForce RTX 30 series parts for laptops, NVIDIA also offered an in-depth reveal of their next desktop graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3060. Reflected the continued progression of the Ampere architecture into smaller and cheaper video cards as NVIDIA continues its product stack rollout, the RTX 3060 marks the introduction of Ampere into their popular mainstream-enthusiast 60-series video card tier. Long the backbone of NVIDIA's desktop sales in North America and elsewhere, the 60-tier cards typically strike a solid balance between price and performance. And with prices set to start at $329, at launch the RTX 3060 will become the cheapest RTX card that NVIDIA has ever offered!

At any rate, the 3060's biggest selling point (aside from its sub-$350 price tag) is its 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM. That figure surpasses last gen's RTX 2080 Ti, and even this gen's RTX 3080, which have 11 and 8GB of VRAM, respectively. The 3060 was built with a 192-bit memory bus, and it's set to feature 3,584 CUDA cores and a base clock speed of 1.32 GHz (boost clocks go up to 1.78 GHz). It's expected to draw around 170 W of power on average over a PCIe 8-pin connector, which should fit into most modern builds quite nicely.

Nvidia promises up to twice the raster performance of the GTX 1060, and 10x the RT performance. That's a rather useless and frankly puzzling comparison, given that the 1060 is two generations old and doesn't even support RTX in the first place. According to Nvidia's calculations, the RTX 3060 is can push somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-64 FPS in Watch Dogs: Legion at 1080p with RT and DLSS enabled (it's unclear what RT and DLSS settings were used, however). The 2060, however, sinks to the low 40s, which is no surprise given the generational differences here. The 1060's performance is listed as well, but again, it's an irrelevant comparison.

The GeForce RTX 3060 will be launching in late February.