Nvidia plans to save PC games industry by… making the GeForce RTX 3060 again?

Nvidia is reportedly set to restart production of its venerable GeForce RTX 3060 gaming GPU in a bid to find a way for PC gamers to have an affordable but reasonably up-to-date graphics card upgrade over the coming months. For those still stuck on an old GTX-era card, or perhaps with an RTX 2060 or RTX 3050, the RTX 3060 should provide a low-cost performance upgrade that has access to all of Nvidia's latest DLSS 4.5 tech, other than frame generation.

Rising to the top of the most popular graphics card list on the October 2024 Steam Hardware Survey, the RTX 3060 was one of the best graphics cards of its time, providing a solid performance upgrade over the RTX 2060, with significantly better ray tracing capabilities. However, it is now just coming up to being five years old, and has been superseded by the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060. For gamers stuck on even older hardware, though, it could be a welcome lifeline.

The key to this potential move is that Nvidia will be using Samsung to manufacture the GPUs, instead of TSMC. The latter is considered to have the most cutting-edge silicon chip production in the world at the moment, and has produced the last several generations of Nvidia GPUs. However, TSMC is largely at production capacity, with it busy making everything from Apple phone chips to giant Nvidia AI GPUs. Samsung, though, is in a position to dedicate production to these chips, using the same 8nm manufacturing node that was originally used to produce the RTX 3000 range.

Rumors of this move have circulated since at least January this year, but now it has been confirmed by Korean business site, Korea Economic Daily, that Samsung has restarted its 8nm production to meet Nvidia orders.

What isn't yet confirmed is the exact configuration of the RTX 3060 GPUs that will be produced. Originally, the card came with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which communicated with the GPU over a 192-bit memory bus. However, later variants dropped to 8GB of VRAM and used a narrower 128-bit bus, resulting in significantly lower performance (around 20% lower).

Given that RAM supply - including VRAM - is a huge part of why current PC part prices are so high right now, it would make a lot of sense for the new cards to come with the lower VRAM configuration. However, it could be that there's enough GDDR6 stockpiled to meet production demands for the higher-spec card.

Also not confirmed is whether the cards will arrive with a new lower price than when the card was previously available, or if there will even be a publicly-announced launch. Currently, the card is effectively out of stock in all retailers, but secondhand cards go for around $250 on Ebay, while RTX 4060 cards sell new for around $300. As such, we'd hope that a reincarnated RTX 3060 would come in at $200 or less, but that remains to be seen.

As for why the RTX 3060 should still have appeal so long after its launch, as well as offering solid 1080p gaming performance, the card is fully compatible with DLSS 4.5 and its now excellent upscaling. DLSS ray reconstruction is also available for improving ray-traced reflection image quality, and even though frame generation isn't officially supported on 3000-series cards, there are tools that can unlock this feature (something RTX 2000 and earlier cards can't do).