If the RTX 3050 doesn't sound like a brand new GPU to you, that's because it's sort of not. We've had the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti in the gaming laptop sphere for a good while now, but we've been left waiting for the desktop version. Clearly though, it wouldn't be long into 2022 until we'd get our hands on one of them, as Nvidia has just announced the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 discrete graphics card.
Nvidia's CES 2022 call is still ongoing, but it's been packed so far. That's perhaps why we only saw a glimpse of the RTX 3050 specs. We have some key information though, including its $249 starting price tag and end of January availability.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | GeForce RTX 3050 |
|---|---|
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Shader performance (TFLOPS) | 9 |
| RT performance ((TFLOPS) | 18 |
| Tensor performance (TFLOPS) | 73 |
| Availability | Jan. 27 |
| Price | $249 |
The key thing the RTX 3050 brings to the table is the Ampere architecture, and with it support for technologies such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and ray tracing. Now I don't suspect you'll get much real-time ray tracing going on this card, but DLSS is sure to be a boon to the overall performance in supported games.
Talking about performance, Nvidia offers us some glimpse of performance, though it's not quite a straightforward head to head. Nvidia's incorporating DLSS and RT into its numbers, which aren't technologies supported on the older cards. This is all to say the RTX 3050 will be faster than its ageing budget counterparts, especially with DLSS, but we're not exactly sure by how much when it's a totally fair fight.
