NVIDIA’s Entry-Level GeForce RTX 3050 Rumored To Utilize Ampere GA107 GPU With 2304 Cores & 90W TGP

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3060, RTX 3050 Graphics Cards

It looks like even NVIDIA's entry-level lineup in its Ampere stack, including the GeForce RTX 3050, will be featuring ray-tracing support as the latest rumor from Kopite7kimi (via Videocardz) seems to suggest.

According to the rumor, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 will be utilizing the GA107 GPU core. This means that even the entry-level parts will indeed feature raytracing support, unlike the GTX 1650 and 1660 series cards which didn't come with the necessary tensor or raytracing cores to enable hardware-accelerated raytracing and DLSS features in games.

RTX 3050, GA107-300, 2304FP32, 90W TGP

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) November 9, 2020

The GeForce RTX 3050 is suggested to feature the GA107-300 GPU which seems to be the most entry-level Ampere GPU at this point in desktop graphics cards. Only time will tell if we will see something even lower-end like the GA108 GPU but the RTX 3050 leaves little room for that. The card is expected to feature 2304 FP32 cores in a total of 18 SM units and is suggested to feature a 90W TGP.

This would mean that the GeForce RTX 3050 will require an external 6-pin connector to boot unlike its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 1650, which conformed to a 75W TGP and didn't require any plug to boot in several custom variants. The GeForce RTX 3050 should feature a 128-bit bus interface & up to 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. We are likely to see speeds of 14 Gbps on the card but that remains to be confirmed.

NVIDIA also has several GA106 GPUs planned for launch in the coming months that will include the RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 which we detailed here.

In terms of performance, the GeForce RTX 3050 should land somewhere around GeForce RTX 2060 performance. It will be ahead of the GeForce RTX 1660 SUPER which was a $229 US graphics card. Pricing wise, the RTX 3050 should be positioned around $150 US, and NVIDIA could throw in a game bundle to sweeten the deal. The card would be a great solution for 1080p gaming but AMD won't be coming slowly in this segment with its own RDNA 2 based solution such as the Radeon RX 6500.