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The previously rumored new spin on the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is really underway, with Asus revealing its revamped take on the popular Ampere GPU.
As VideoCardz (opens in new tab) Asus has unveiled a few new TUF GDDR6X models of its RTX 3060 Ti graphics card, one of which is the base card and another the OC edition.
The only difference with the existing TUF RTX 3060 Ti boards is that the 8GB of VRAM is faster. Instead of 14 Gbps GDDR6 video RAM, the upgraded cards use 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory, significantly increasing the total memory bandwidth from 448 GB/s to 608 GB/s.
That’s the only change here, and otherwise the CUDA Core count, clocks, and all other specs remain the same.
VideoCardz points out that ramping up memory bandwidth results in about a 7% to 10% increase in performance based on 3DMark scores.
Analysis: Will that VRAM really make that much of a difference?
Of course synthetic benchmarks are a useful indicator, but what we really want to see is how much of a difference the faster VRAM makes to real-world gaming (across the usual variety of titles to get an overall idea of the real impact on strengthening frame rates).
Obviously there will be some performance boost, but it may be a relatively small boost. Still, depending on the price and how much of a difference the new GDDR6X RAM makes – which the jury is still out on, of course – this new twist on the RTX 3060 Ti could be an attractive purchase. And we must not forget that the vanilla 3060 Ti has (finally) witnessed some solid price drops lately.
That said, with Nvidia pursuing a ‘layered’ launch strategy – rolling out the next-gen RTX 4000 graphics cards at a slow pace (and indeed reversing course with one of them, ‘unlaunching’ it) – it remains to be seen when Mid-range Lovelace will be out, with rumors suggesting it may not be around for a while. (Remember, Nvidia reportedly has a fair amount of RTX 3000 inventory to clear).
And if that’s the case, we could be stuck with the RTX 3060 and the Ti variant for a while (including this new version of the latter, of course), so the price could drop a little less quickly and maybe level off as a result. , at least for now.