NVIDIA officially announced its latest entry-level graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3050, during its CES 2022 special announcement. The card is set to retail from US$249 (~RM1049), effectively making it the cheapest RTX 30 series card in the GPU brand’s arsenal, to date.
Like its bigger and more powerful siblings, the RTX 3050 is built around the Ampere architecture, along with the same 2nd generation RT Cores and 3rd generation Tensor Cores, along with 8GB GDDR6 graphics memory.
A core reason as to why NVIDIA decided to release an RTX-capable entry-level card like the RTX 3050 is, unsurprisingly, due to the ongoing chip shortage and graphics card constraint that has left many gamers unable to upgrade their current graphics card to something more up-to-date. In fact, it’s the cheapest RTX 30 series card that will allow gamers to run their favourite triple-A title at 60 fps with ray-tracing turned on, albeit at just Full HD.
Much like NVIDIA did with the launch of the RTX 3060, though, the RTX 3050 is clearly not getting a Founders Edition, with the GPU maker leaving cooling solutions to its AiB partners. Of course, it’s almost a certainty that they will mark up the price on their respective cards, and to add oil to what is clearly an already raging inferno, there’s no assurance that the card will be readily available.
