Following up on the release of the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 earlier this year, NVIDIA today launched the RTX 3060 Ti. Priced at $400, the company claims the card is more powerful than last generation’s RTX 2080 Super which was priced at $700.

Image courtesy NVIDIA

Supporting the same flagship features—like accelerated ray-tracing, DLSS 2.0, and RTX IO—as the more expensive 30-series cards, the RTX 3060 Ti is introduced as the most affordable GPU in the lineup. Here’s the basic 3060 Ti specs, price, and release date alongside the other 30-series cards:

RTX 3090 RTX 3080 RTX 3070 RTX 3060 Ti
Price $1,500 $700 $500 $400
Release Date September 24th, 2020 September 17th, 2020 October 29th, 2020
December 2nd, 2020
CUDA Cores 10,496 8,704 5,888 4,864
Boost Clock (GHz) 1.7 1.71 1.73 1.67
Memory 24GB (GDDR6X) 10GB (GDDR6X) 8GB (GDDR6) 8GB (GDDR6)
Connectors 1x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a

Although Nvidia says the card can outpace the RTX 2080 Super, we haven’t found any detailed data released by the company on that claim just yet. However, it did put out some data on the 3060 Ti vs. RTX 2060 Super vs. GTX 1070 by comparing framerate in two ray-traced games and one game without ray-tracing.

Data courtesy NVIDIA

The RTX 3060 Ti is available starting today, both from NVIDIA and other GPU vendors; you can check out a complete list of availability here.

AMD this year also revealed its latest Radeon 6000-series GPUs in October, touting an included USB-C port “for a modern VR experience.”

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Ad

    This is what’s so annoying about the standalone narrative. This card is $399 and can play both Half Life Alyx and Cyberpunk 77. Why in every conversation about “VR Ready PCs” do people seem to act like a person would buy an entire PC and then use it for VR and nothing else? Like it’s obvious that a lot of devs or journalists don’t play games, but you would think enough people would that they would at least mention that we are just weeks off from every GPU on the market being capable of playing Half Life Alyx and even many laptops being able to use VR comfortably if they have dedicated graphics or an eGPU.

    It’s so frustrating that this Facebook nonsense took off now, when GPU prices should have crashed while performance fell, and when most PC gamers will be upgrading their rigs and console gamers are starting to migrate around.

    • Amni3D

      It’s been borderline propaganda that “standalone is the only future forwards”, followed by this sentiment that standalone only exists in a bubble that can’t be touched by console and PCVR.

      Currently this is the best point in time for the Quest 2’s release, I think it’s only going down hill from there once PCVR and console VR HMDs release.

      • Ad

        Standalone would be proven as the only way forward if it was like 500 and PCVR was 300. The fact that its the cheapest of either throws a wrench in this, and the fact that Valve isn’t trying to make PCVR more strong in its own right.

      • alxslr

        Facebook is rushing Quest2, fearing the moment when PCVR becomes fully wireless. Standalone is cool to show friends, but if you are at home and you have a wireless PCVR, much of that standalone advantage falls and you are left with phone graphics cheap VR headets.
        An Index2 announcement in 2021 would be great.

        • crim3

          An Index2 with Reverb G2 panels and lenses or equivalent would be the top VR headset even wired.

    • Betty Osteen

      Google basically is as of now paying an awesome charge of 179/hour and most significant thing is each week payout….(o3643)…. Google doesn’t have impediments like age or some PC ability thusly you may endeavor also. I have procured $20K simply in 14 days. Check here what I do…>>>> http://www.LifestylesLinks.com |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

  • Ad

    Ben, sometime in the next few months you should put out an editorial about how Covid is the most monumental event in VR since the Rift Kickstarter, and not because it “proved VR.” It froze Valve while Facebook shot ahead, it suppressed any news about VR until late in the year, made every developer and manufacturer much more risk averse and pushed them to make safer bets and long term plans for Facebook, it caused a shortage in consoles that opens the market for the quest, it causes a shortage of GPUs that isn’t expected to end until early next year (especially since cards like the 3060ti should have been godsends for VR since it would mean millions of new VR ready PCs and even laptops, plus people migrating from consoles), caused a shortage of PCVR headsets that also left a big opening for the quest, it may have made cloud streaming services double down their investments to threaten VR strongholds like Steam and PlayStation, some analysts say it pushed back Apple’s AR plans but probably accelerated Facebook’s,

    • Xron

      Well, 400$ price isn’t really godsend ;(
      We need ~200/300$ card at rtx 2080 level, so people could use full potential of Quest2, Index or Reverb g2.
      + Getting 2nd gen Sony Vr Hmd would help Vr to prosper aswell.

      • Ad

        Do we really need a 200 dollar card? You can use computer for other things.

        • Xron

          For average users yes, I mean for kids whose parents buy them pc’s for “learning” and dont want to spend extra cash. 200/300$ ~rtx 2080 performance cards would be awesome.
          Btw I have a question, does quest1 and 2 resolution difference bring big clarity advancement or should I wait for quest/rift next gen?
          I own quest1 + cv1.

          • Ad

            ” I mean for kids whose parents buy them pc’s for “learning” and dont want to spend extra cash.”

            This isn’t most consumers in the tech market though.

          • Rogue Transfer

            There isn’t going to be any further Rift headsets. The Quest 2 does bring a big clarity advancement, but less so than the Reverb G2(which has 33% more total pixels and better lenses, less god rays).

            Facebook have announced that they are no longer going to be making PC native headsets and instead are concentrating on the Quest/2 platform – with optional PC link cable(though that introduces additional lag, artifacts and more PC processing load due to compression required by the USB connection it uses).

            Thus, you can’t run PC games through the Quest 2, at as high quality settings or with as super sampled resolution as you could with a native headset(such as the Reverb G2, that doesn’t need any compression).

            For the Quest 2 link you need a beefier PC than a native PC headset, effectively, or you need to reduce the quality/resolution rendered.

          • Cragheart

            Facebook traitors. I knew it would be bad when they acquired Oculus.

    • Amni3D

      Definitely. Also the native PCVR HMD shortage can’t be understated. Lots of people are grabbing the Quest like they did the Rift; they just want a SteamVR HMD since every other headset is either discontinued or $600+ WITH limited stock.

      • Ad

        The failure of HTC to just make a Vive S is just a monumental facepalm that destroyed the whole market.

  • oomph

    Why not sell a steam box too.
    (mabbe with Linux)

  • 6.9Ghz

    Priced at $400

    [citation needed]

    • TechPassion

      2 years ago for 10% worse performance you had to pay 800 USD.

      • marcandrdsilets

        Yeah it’s crazy how price/performance is getting better but 400USD is still a lot of money for most people.

      • Cragheart

        RTX 2080 was a ridiculous offer. 2018 was at least 5 years away from RT and DLSS becoming a standard. That card wasn’t even worth 500 USD. I would rather have 1080 Ti, because in 2023, both will be weak.

  • TechPassion

    It is a great card for VR. You can play with G2 at its 100% supersampling, at max details.

  • Ragbone

    Does this work with a kettle plug?

  • Zantetsu

    Nvidia is playing a very strange game. They announce new cards at lower prices and higher performance than their existing cards, but with zero availability. Therefore they suppress sales of their existing cards (I might have bought an RTX 2080 as i intended to build a new rig for Christmas, but now am just going to wait until RTX 3000 cards become actually available) while not actually being able to replace them with new cards.

    They’re Osborning themselves, I can’t fathom why. They should not have announced the 3000 series until they could actually produce them in numbers.

    • flamaest

      They’re not Osborning themselves, the cards ARE in the sales channels, YOU just can’t get them. It is widely reported that these cards are being purchased at high volume by crypto miners. Same thing happened with e 20XX series for months after their release.

      • Zantetsu

        I had not heard that. I was under the impression that a small number of cards were made available and were bought up immediately by scalpers. But I guess bitcoin being hot again could explain some of it.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Not really, if you really keep looking and watching, you can buy an 30×0 card almost any day now, BUT you have to be quick, stores only get a few cards at the time and they are sold out almost immediately

        • marcandrdsilets

          I’ve been trying to get my hand on one since launch with no luck in canada :(

  • sfmike

    I’m tired of reading about cards that are near impossible to find for sale not from a damn scalper.

    • marcandrdsilets

      Same here, and it’s the same with all new tech, ps5, seriesX scalpers are buying everything :(

  • NooYawker

    I’d like to see some VR benchmarks with these news AMD and Nvidia cards. I’ve seen one or two on youtube

  • david vincent

    Cool it makes the Reverb G2 a bit less ruinous, if it wasn’t for the fuc*ing crypto miners….

  • Cragheart

    For most of the world, $399+ is a lot to ask for a single video card.

  • Not thrilled. I only got my 2070 Super a few months ago. But then again, I don’t feel any lack of power in it.

    Again, as I’ve pointed out dozens of times, just as Lucky Palmer himself said, it’s not the VR goggles that are the issue, it’s the content. Same with video cards. There’s not many AAA VR games to play, so I don’t feel there’s any reason to have more GPU power.

    If nVidia really wants to get me to buy their shiny new card, they need to bride some AAA Studio to make some games that actually demand it.

    Oh, and attempt to have some stock for me to buy. What’s the point of a new card that’s sold out everywhere?

    • TechPassion

      Turn on supersampling and you will see. My overclocked 2080 RTX (+160MHz core, 500 MHz memory) barely made it with 2070×2560 per eye and that’s the way to play VR games. High quality world in VR. 3060 Ti is 10% faster than 2080 RTX, so it is a card which can finally be good enough for some time.

  • 400? WOW