According to Nvidia’s internal testing, it doesn’t quite achieve the same performance jumps as its bigger brothers when pitted against the previous generation, angling itself as a GTX 1060 replacement instead. The green team’s thought process is that the GTX 1060 is still the most popular graphics card according to Steam’s December 2020 hardware survey, and it wants to give a good reason to upgrade with twice the raster performance and ten times the ray tracing performance – although we doubt many people are using their GTX cards for ray tracing.
As expected, you’ll find 12GB of GDDR6 memory under the hood, which might raise an eyebrow being four gigabytes more than the RTX 3060 Ti. It also has a slightly higher boost clock with 1.78GHz under its belt. Unlike the Ti variant, however, it has a smaller memory interface width at 192-bit, significantly less CUDA cores, dropping from 4,864 to 3,584. The jury’s still out on how they stack up against one another, however, as specs sheets are world’s apart from hands-on testing, but there’s every chance the newcomer could place on our list of best graphics cards.