NVIDIA is about to “de-release” another of its graphics cards and replace it with a slower one. This time it's the GeForce RTX 3050 8GB. Uncle Jensen intends to make it more affordable by reducing the VRAM to 6 GB. The reason is that it cannibalizes the sales of the GeForce RTX 4060. We all know that the RTX 4060 is considerably faster than the RTX 3050, but the identical size of VRAM attracts less informed buyers to the latter.
Reports out of China indicate that the GeForce RTX 3050 is eating the RTX 4060 launch for breakfast. And since NVIDIA doesn't want to reduce the price of the newest card, it decided to widen the segmentation by removing the RTX 3050 8GB and replacing it with a slower 6GB variant. It could also be that the Team Green is preparing to launch the RTX 4050 and wants to make room for it.
Unfortunately for gamers, 8 GB is already a lot, as many recent titles use up to 12 GB of graphics memory at 1080p. To make matters worse, the 6 GB variant of the RTX 3050 will likely be equipped with a thinner 96-bit bus (compared to 128 bits for the 8 GB) which reduces bandwidth.
The GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB has 2,560 FP32 shaders clocked at 1.77 GHz (boost) and a 128-bit bus. This results in a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s. By reducing the bus to 96 bits, the bandwidth would be only 168 GB/s.
NVIDIA and its partners will wait until existing stocks are exhausted, after which the 6 GB model will replace the existing model. The latter should be marketed in January.
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