Nvidia followed Intel and AMD as the third major chip maker to hold a CES 2021 press conference, announcing a new desktop video card and a trio of RTX 30 series GPUs for laptops. Let’s start with the big news: the new conventional RTX 3060 graphics card.
As rumored, the RTX 3060 Ti has a younger brother: the plain old RTX 3060. The new video card must look identical from the outside – although it is somehow depicted with just a single fan in Nvidia’s press materials – but uses the Nvidia -end GA106 GPU bass instead of the mid-range GA104 that we saw at the heart of the 3060 Ti and 3070.
From the graphics provided by the Green Team, the 3060 is expected to deliver RTX 2070 or 2070 Super performance levels – meaning a comfortable 1080p or 1440p decent game in AAA titles, perhaps extending to 4K in older games or in reduced settings.
Interestingly, the card has 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which means that it has more VRAM than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, which have only 8 GB. Also have Faster 15 Gbps memory, compared to 14 Gbps on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. However, this is somewhat balanced by its 192-bit memory interface, which is narrower than the 256-bit equivalent on the two older cards. faces.
Computing is also significantly reduced, with the 3060 having only 3584 CUDA cores compared to 4864 on the 3060 Ti and 5888 on the 3070. The smaller GPU means that the card is capable of consuming less power than the 3060 Ti, with a nominal TDP 170W compared to 200W on Ti.
It is difficult to assess how these tradeoffs will affect performance, especially within the memory subsystems. Presumably, the 3060 will be able to store more textures in memory at once, perhaps making it a little more prepared for the future, especially for RT titles, but the loading of textures may take a little longer and therefore frames may be slightly smaller, while the reductions to calculate should result in a significantly slower card overall. We will have to test it for ourselves once the card reaches DF HQ.
The recommended retail price of the card is $ 329, which is $ 70 below the RTX 3060 Ti, and will be available from the end of February … although it is hard to imagine that the shortage issues that affected the RTX 30- series from the beginning will have been solved in just one month.
The RTX 3060 has just been announced, costs 9 and offers performance ~ RTX 2070 with retail availability expected in early 2025 pic.twitter.com/wLH4yVpdkS
– Digital foundry offers (@DealsFoundry) January 12, 2021
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The RTX 3060 will also be available on laptops from January 26, along with the mobile versions of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 – which now come with a ‘Laptop’ suffix so you can easily distinguish them from desktop variants. Fortunately, this date is when AMD’s Ryzen 5000 laptops will also be available, so many models will receive CPU and GPU updates at the same time – something that doesn’t always happen when the CPU and GPU releases are further away.
Although the new laptop parts use the same second-generation RT cores and third-generation Tensor cores as other RTX 30 series cards, the general configurations here are quite different. For example, the RTX 3080 laptop gets 8 GB or 16 GB of GDDR6 and 6144 CUDA cores, while the 3080 desktop uses 10 GB of faster GDDR6X cores and 8704 sports cores. This makes it difficult to judge the relative performance between the two; proper tests in the real world will be the best way to proceed here.
Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the number of different configurations available to laptop manufacturers, which include more than a dozen Max-P and Max-Q RTX 3080 laptop variants, with clock speeds, memory speeds and power targets. variables.
The comparison with the parts of the previous generation laptop is a little more direct, with Nvidia claiming that the RTX 3080 is about 50 percent faster than the 2080 in games like Control, Minecraft RTX and Borderlands 3 at 1440p. The 3070 is described as up to 50 percent faster than the RTX 2070 and the RTX 3060 is described as 30 percent faster than a PS5 … and no, we don’t know what that means either. In general, however, we are seeing slightly smaller generation-to-generation gains on the laptop side than on the desktop, probably thanks to the stricter power restrictions on these mobile form factors.
As well as new hardware, there are some new features that you should be aware of. One of the biggest is the support for scalable BAR, which provided performance gains of one to two low digits on RX 6000 series boards. It works by allowing all VRAMs on a board to be accessed directly, instead of an E / buffer 256 MB. It will be interesting to see if this feature is available on all RTX 30 series laptops, and if it is only enabled in the background or if it can be turned on and off to measure its performance multiplier.
Note that the resizable BAR will also be provided on the RTX 3060 desktop video card, with VBIOS updates required to enable the feature on previous RTX 30 series cards. To use the feature, you will need to run an AMD B550 or X570 motherboard that supports the feature; on Intel, some Z490 cards and all Z590 cards must also support the feature.
Nvidia’s Max-Q framework now includes some updated features as well, including Dynamic Boost 2.0 and WhisperMode 2.0. The idea behind Dynamic Boost 2.0 is to increase the power of the GPU or VRAM at the expense of the power of the CPU when a game would benefit from it, thereby increasing the frame rates in GPU-linked scenarios. This works frame by frame, thus allowing for a very dynamic energy allocation. WhisperMode 2.0 works in the opposite direction, minimizing heat and noise in exchange for reduced performance; this now runs on a system level, rather than GeForce Experience.
As we mentioned earlier, availability for these new 30 series laptops starts on January 26, with Nvidia promising more than 70 laptop models from various OEMs – such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, Lenovo and Razer – right from the start. Starting at $ 1000 for RTX 3060 machines, up to about three times more than for the better equipped RTX 3080 models. If you are looking for a laptop upgrade, be sure to check the CPUs too – some models will come with the latest generation AMD or Intel chips instead of the new Intel 11th generation or AMD Ryzen 5000 processors, and it is always good to get the components latest, if possible.
That’s it for now, but we’ll be back soon to share some more highlights from CES 2021 – including Razer’s incredibly wacky ads, the best HDMI 2.1 monitors to look for, and more. In the meantime, why not check out our review of AMD or Intel announcements at CES 2021?