Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB

More memory, less bandwidth and compute

- JARRED WALTON

IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that there’s such a thing as a GPU that’s about 20 percent faster than its predecessor and costs less money. That sounds like a good product. Sadly, only one of those things exists right now.

On paper, Nvidia’s RTX 3060 continues the well-trodden path of releasing smaller and less costly GPUs that also trim performance, at a theoretically lower price. Unfortunately, cryptocurrency mining, the pandemic, and global shortages of chip manufacturing and substrates make the latest addition feel every bit as much vaporware as the other Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA2 GPUs launched in the past nine months.

But these GPUs do actually exist. We have tested every one of them, and you can even find them on places like eBay. It’s just that most of the cards are marked up to two or three times the “official” MSRPs. Unfortunately, we don’t anticipate any modern graphics card will sell for its MSRP any time this year. Let’s just assume you could choose between the cards, though, rather than just taking whatever GPU you manage to find in stock. How does the RTX 3060 stack up?