Gigabyte Nvidia recently introduced three new GPUs as part of the Super overhaul of the RTX 40-series. This is aimed at improving the affordability of graphics cards priced at $600 and above. However, today the company quietly launched a $200 graphics card for the first time in four years. According to TechPowerUp, Nvidia’s partners such as Gigabyte have started to officially announce the 6GB version of the older RTX 3050 cards, with reduced memory and memory bandwidth, fewer CUDA cores, and lower power requirements. The launch follows several days of product listings at discounted prices, indicating an anticipated MSRP of around $179 for the new cards. This could mark Nvidia’s first $200 card since the release of the GeForce GTX 1650 Super at the end of 2019, after a four-year gap partially caused by the cryptocurrency and GPU shortage from late 2020 to mid-2022.
The RTX 3050 6GB offers some improvements over the original 8GB version, which was released during the GPU shortage in early 2022. It has 6GB of memory linked to a narrower 96-bit memory bus. While reports vary on the expected number of CUDA cores—TechPowerUp and Tom’s Hardware say 2,048, while Gigabyte’s 6GB 3050 pages list 2,304—it’s clear that there are fewer cores than the original RTX 3050, with lower clock speeds. This makes it suitable for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings, depending on the game, and should fit into smaller machines. One of Gigabyte’s versions is a smaller card designed to fit in most office desktops, and its power requirement of 70 W means the cards can draw all the power they need from the PCI Express slot without the need for an external power connector.
As a scaled-down version of a two-year-old card based on last year’s 3.5-core GPU design, the RTX 3050 doesn’t stand out remarkably. However, it becomes more interesting when considering that Nvidia’s competitors are selling an older version of the non-Super GTX 1650 for the same price. The impact of the narrower bus on the performance of the 6GB 3050 compared to the 1650 is uncertain, but the former features a higher number of new CUDA cores, ray-tracing support, an additional 2GB of GDDR6 RAM, and Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling support. The new card also challenges one of AMD’s key products for its new Ryzen 8000G processors, which integrate 1080p GPUs.
While it’s encouraging to see a slowdown in the entry-level GPU market, there is still a significant gap from the mid-to-late 2010s when $200 cards like the GTX 1050 Ti and the 1650 were launched shortly after other cards in the same series, using new GPU architectures available at the time. The desktop version of the RTX 4050 lineup seems unlikely at this point, and a desktop version at or below $200 appears even more unlikely. Despite this, slow and unimpressive change is still change.
