Nvidia succeeded Intel and AMD as the third major chipmaker to hold a CES 2021 press conference, announcing a new graphics card and a trio of RTX 30 series GPUs for laptops. Let’s start with the big news first: the new mainstream RTX 3060 graphics card.
As rumor has it, the RTX 3060 Ti has a baby brother: the regular RTX 3060. The new graphics card should look identical from the outside – although somehow it’s imaged with just one fan in Nvidia’s press footage, but it uses Nvidia’s low end GA106 GPU rather than the midrange GA104 we saw in the heart of the 3060 Ti and 3070.
Of the cards offered by the Green Team, the 3060 should deliver around RTX 2070 or 2070 Super performance levels – meaning it’s comfortable 1080p or decent 1440p games in AAA titles, perhaps up to 4K in older games or against lower settings stretch.
Interestingly, the card has 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which means it has more VRAM than the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, which has only 8 GB. It also has faster 15Gbps memory, compared to 14Gbps on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. However, it is somewhat balanced by the 192-bit memory interface, which is narrower than the 256-bit equivalent on the two more expensive cards.
Computation 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 the card can draw less power than the 3060 Ti, with a TDP of 170W compared to 200W on the Ti.
It is difficult to determine how these compromises will affect performance, especially in the memory subsystems. Presumably the 3060 will be able to keep more textures in memory at the same time, which may make it a bit more future-proof, especially for RT titles, but loading textures may take a bit longer and therefore the frame rate may be a bit lower, while the reduction to be able to calculate should result in a totally slower map. We will have to test it ourselves as soon as the card arrives at DF HQ.
The recommended selling price of the card is $ 329, which is $ 70 below the RTX 3060 Ti, and it will be available from the end of February … although it is hard to imagine that the stock shortages that the RTX 30 series of the started plagued. will be resolved within just one month.
The RTX 3060 has just been announced, it costs 9 and offers ~ RTX 2070 performance with the expected retail availability expected in early 2025. pic.twitter.com/wLH4yVpdkS
– Digital Foundry Deals (@DealsFoundry) 12 January 2021
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The RTX 3060 will also be available on laptops from January 26, along with mobile versions of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 – which now come comfortable with a ‘Laptop’ suffix, so you can easily distinguish it from the desktop variants. Luckily, this is the date when AMD’s Ryzen 5000 laptops will also be available, so many models are getting a CPU and GPU update at the same time – something that does not always happen when CPU and GPU versions are further apart.
While the new laptop parts use the same second-generation RT legs and third-generation Tensor legs as other RTX-30 series cards, the overall configurations here are completely different. For example, the RTX 3080 laptop gets 8 GB or 16 GB of GDDR6 and 6144 CUDA cores, while the desktop 3080 uses 10 GB faster GDDR6X and sports 8704 cores. This makes it difficult to judge the relative performance between the two; proper testing in the real world would be the best way here.
Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the number of configurations available for laptops, which include more than a dozen Max-P and Max-Q RTX 3080 laptop variants, with varying clock speeds, memory speeds and power targets.
The comparison to previous-generation laptop parts is a bit simpler, 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 50 percent faster than the RTX 2070 and the RTX 3060 is described as 30 percent faster than a PS5 … and no, we do not know that either. In general, however, we see slightly smaller gene-to-gene gains on the laptop side than what we saw on the desktop, probably due to the stricter power constraints in these mobile form factors.
Besides the new hardware, there are also some new features to note. One of the biggest is Resizeable BAR support, which delivered single to low double-digit performance improvements on the RX 6000 series cards. It works by directly accessing all the VRAMs of a card, rather than via a 256MB I / O buffer. It will be interesting to see if this feature is available on all RTX 30 series laptops, and if it is only turned on in the background and if it can be turned on and off to measure its performance multiplier.
Note that Resizeable BAR is also shipped on the RTX 3060 graphics card, with VBIOS updates required to enable the feature on earlier RTX-30 cards. To use the feature, you must use an AMD B550 or X570 motherboard that supports the feature; on Intel, some Z490 boards and all Z590 boards must also support this feature.
Nvidia’s Max-Q framework now also includes some updated features, including Dynamic Boost 2.0 and WhisperMode 2.0. The idea behind Dynamic Boost 2.0 is to increase GPU or VRAM power at the expense of CPU power when a game benefits from it, thus increasing frame rates in GPU-bound scenarios. It works on a frame-by-frame basis, allowing for a fairly dynamic allocation. WhisperMode 2.0 runs the other way around, reducing heat and noise in exchange for reduced performance; it now runs at a system level rather than in GeForce Experience.
As already mentioned, the availability of this new 30-series laptops starts on January 26, with Nvidia promising more than 70 laptop models from different OEMs – such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, Lenovo and Razer – right outside the gate. It starts at $ 1000 for RTX 3060 machines up to about three times as much for the most well-equipped RTX 3080 models. If you are looking for a laptop upgrade, you should also check the CPUs. Some models will come with latest generation AMD or Intel chips, rather than the new Intel 11th generation or AMD Ryzen 5000 processors, and it’s always nice to get the latest components if you can.
That’s all for now, but we’ll soon be sharing some CES 2021 highlights again – including Razer’s incredible bonkers announcements, the best HDMI 2.1 monitors to watch, and more. In the meantime, look at our breakdown of AMD or Intel’s CES 2021 announcements?