NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Graphics Card Specs, Performance, Price & Availability – Here’s Everything We Know So Far

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card is coming out in a few weeks and here's all that we know so far regarding its specs, price, and performance.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card is going to be a major launch for the green team. It's by no mean a flagship or high-end product but it's aiming at a heated market segment where AMD has recently introduced its Radeon RX 6500 XT & Intel is going to pit it against their own ARC A380 graphics card. So let's talk about what we know so far about this upcoming product and what consumers can expect from it. For those who want more enthusiast products, there's the RTX 3090 Ti that's coming out soon too!

Just like the GeForce RTX 3060, the GeForce RTX 3050 will also be featuring the GA106 GPU but a cut-down configuration. The card will feature 20 SM units and 2560 CUDA cores with a TGP of 130 Watts. The graphics card will feature a base clock of 1550 MHz and a boost clock of 1780 MHz but do expect custom models to feature higher factory overclocks. At its stock speeds, the card will be able to output 9.11 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower. That's more than 2x the TFLOPs compared to the GTX 1650 SUPER.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is built with the powerful graphics performance of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture. It offers dedicated 2nd gen RT Cores and 3rd gen Tensor Cores, new streaming multiprocessors, and high-speed G6 memory to tackle the latest games. Step up to GeForce RTX.

via NVIDIA

The entry-level graphics card will also rock 8 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps and will be running across a 128-bit wide bus interface for a total of 224 GB/s bandwidth. Already, the card is looking like a much better deal for just $50 US over the Radeon RX 6500 XT which has an MSRP of $199 US but packs a 4 GB memory. The card will rock a single 8-pin connector to boot.

As for its feature set, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card rocks all the modern NV feature set such as the latest NVENC Encoder and NVCDEC Decoder, support for the latest APIs, 2nd Generation ray-tracing cores, 3rd Gen Tensor cores. Considering that this is an entry-level solution aimed at eSports gamers heavily, it packs all the modern features such as DLSS, Reflex, Broadcast, Resizable-BAR, Freestyle, Ansel, Highlights, Shadowplay, and G-SYNC support too.

In terms of performance, the GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card will offer over 60 FPS at 1080p in several AAA titles and further extend the performance rating through the use of 2nd Gen RT and new Tensor cores, marking a big leap over the GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card.

Surely DLSS and RT cores will prove to be a major uplift in titles that support them so we can expect the card to easily be faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER though the numbers provided by NVIDIA so far don't showcase that exactly. So we have to wait for independent reviews that are expected to go live one day early prior to launch day.

Something that's easy to overlook within these benchmarks is the fact that only one game in the bar chart above has numbers for the older generation cards while the other two games are tested with RTX On, a feature that isn't available on the former options. As such, these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt and readers should wait for proper numbers when the reviews go live. Expect our review when the embargo lifts.

As for price, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card is said to feature an MSRP of $249 US which looks very attractive over the $199 US of the Radeon RX 6500 XT 4 GB if you take into account all the extra features available on the GeForce RTX 30 series cards. With that said, you have to keep in mind that the current market situation won't allow the card to ever hit MSRP prices so we are realistically expecting the 3050 8 GB to land in around $350-$450 US. That's $50 US more than the retail prices for the RX 6500 XT which is in line with the MSRP difference of both cards.

There are reports that the card will be available in good quantities at launch but all those claims have been blown away to dust recently so we have to wait and see if that's really going to be the case. Following are some of the retail links that you could visit to find the graphics card on launch day (27th January 2022):

The graphics card will be available in several custom models at launch from all major NVIDIA AIB partners. You can check them out at the product pages for each respective manufacturer that are provided below:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Custom Models Round-Up:

Besides what we know so far officially, there are also several rumors and reports around the card. It was briefly listed online for over $400 US but managed to sell out within hours. To be honest, the $400 US pricing doesn't seem that bad when you look at where the RX 6500 XT or the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER cards are at right now. We even got to see the first high-resolution pictures of the GPU that powers the GeForce RTX 3050, the GA106-150 from AIBs.

What's more interesting is that there are rumors that a 4 GB model of the RTX 3050 with cut-down specs could launch later on at a lower price point of around $199 USD to directly tackle the RX 6500 XT though that remains to be seen. It also seems like we have the first performance benchmarks which show great gaming performance but poor crypto performance, a first for GeForce Ampere cards!

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