NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Launched

At CES 2022, NVIDIA launched a new low-end GPU. The entry-level NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 is the refresh of the 1050, 1050 TI, and 1650 line that is coming quite a long time after the previous generations were launched. Our GeForce RTX 3090 review was in 2020 and our NVLink review was in Q1 2021.

Again, this is being done line, please excuse typos.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Launched

For the big features, the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 will have ray tracing, hence RTX. It will have 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Pricing is $249, or about $50 more than AMD’s CES 2022 entry Radeon.

In terms of performance, NVIDIA claims big performance updates compared to the previous 50-class of GPUs.

With the new ray tracing features, NVIDIA says it can get even more performance further pushing the envelope.

Something interesting here is that NVIDIA is comparing here to the GTX 1050 Ti, not the more recent GTX 1650. NVIDIA shows that the older generation gets 0 (no units) but perhaps that is because the older GTX 1050 Ti was an older generation part that did not have RT cores.

Final Words

At this point, the hard part of the story is the availability. NVIDIA says starting at $249 and will be available on January 27, 2022. If recent history has been any indication, then we have two insights. First, these will be hard to find on that date. Second, the street pricing is going to be higher. That is where the GPU market is these days. NVIDIA is heavily leaning into the creator space and also took some shots at the Apple M1 Max in its CES 2022 presentation. It is certainly feeling the pressure but is pushing back heavily with Omniverse.

Of course, it will be an extreme budget compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti that we will be covering in the next piece.