Since it’s nearly impossible to buy the RTX 3090, and the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 are basically unavailable in Australia, there’s no better time for Nvidia to beef out their product stack a little further. Let’s take a look at the RTX 3060 Ti.
As announced by practically everyone in the industry a few weeks ago, the RTX 3060 Ti is here to fill the enormous gulf below the RTX 3070 and RX 6800, cards that are priced around $900 in Australia. (The actual prices aren’t supposed to be that high, at least not for the RTX 3070, but there’s not much that can be done about that right now.)
There’s no Australian listings live, and the official Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti landing page doesn’t have a local price yet. (Update: Australian and New Zealand pricing is below.)
But I’ll update you on that when we have more information. Some reviews have already dropped overnight for the RTX 3060 Ti.
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti: Specs, Australian Price, Release Date
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
- Process Node: Samsung 8nm
- Base/boost clocks: 1.41GHz/1.665GHz
- CUDA Cores: 4864
- Memory: 8GB GDDR6, 256-bit bus
- TDP: 200W
- Price: $688, $NZ815
- Release Date: December 2 (internationally)
Update 1:00pm AEDT: Nvidia has confirmed that the MSRP for the RTX 3060 Ti in Australia is $688.
A bit of a standout here is the CUDA cores. If you’re someone who just needs a discrete GPU for some production work — audio, perhaps, but not extreme 3D rendering — then the RTX 3060 Ti offers more than twice the CUDA cores of the RTX 2060 Super and a hell of a lot more than the RTX 2080 Super (which had 3072 CUDA cores).
Reviews have already started to drop in, although making comparisons for the RTX 3060 Ti have been difficult. For one, it’s not really enough to just compare the RTX 3060 Ti to previous generations of RTX cards (or even the 10-series GPUs). AMD’s a much more robust competitor these days. They’re especially competitive at lower resolutions and non-ray traced gaming, which is largely what an RTX 3060 Ti would be doing.
But AMD doesn’t have a card in that price bracket yet. Their next GPU is the RX 6900 XT, the RTX 3090 rival, and we’re not likely to see any lower end cards until Q1 2021 at the earliest. And that’s if you can even buy any GPUs until then, with how brutal the supply issues are right now.
Still, the initial results are good. Our sister site Gizmodo liked what the 3060 Ti offered in the mid-range price bracket, especially with its RTX 2080 Super-level performance at half the price.
Hardware Unboxed also found it was superior to the RTX 2080 Super across an 18 game average, and it wasn’t far off the RTX 2080 Ti either. That remained the case at 1440p gaming as well, with better 1 percent minimum FPS results as well.
You can get some reasonable 4K gaming in with the 3060 Ti as well, although you might want to sacrifice some quality settings in games that are especially brutal towards Nvidia hardware (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Valhalla being a good example).
But what’s tricky about all this is that it’s just hard to really evaluate how much you’re getting when we have no idea what the price premium is going to be. A card valued at $599 is a totally different price proposition to one at $699, especially if there’s a competitor at the same price (or nearby). You can’t remove the cost paid for what you’re getting, and then there’s the trickier element of factoring in the value of features like DLSS, ray tracing support, and extra features like NVENC encoding support and AI noise removal.
I wouldn’t mind testing the card, but unfortunately it was impossible to fit in yet another GPU around [REDACTED]. But there should be plenty of time in January to get hands on with some hardware — and by then, hopefully people might be able to actually buy all the GPUs and consoles they want.
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