“Hardware releases never change. Only the tech changes. Yet it’s not the consumers, but the scalpers, who dominate launch day.”
– Napoleon probably
With the release of Nvidia’s newest graphics card, the RTX 3060 Ti, we’ve seen yet another round of scalpers scalping. Within minutes post-launch, every card that was available was subsequently sold out. Just like we’ve seen with every single new GPU that’s released this year. 2020 will go down as the year of paper releases and scalping.
While the RTX 3060 Ti is touted to be just 10% slower than the last generation’s behemoth, the RTX 2080 Ti, most people won’t have a chance to experience that until deep into 2021. This level of performance also comes at a price that’s a whopping 300% lower than what an RTX 2080 Ti would have cost at release.
Coming loaded with 8GB of 256-bit GDDR6 VRAM and a powerful Ampere GPU, the RTX 3060 Ti is perfectly equipped to handle everything from very high FPS gaming in 1080p, to 60fps gaming in 4k. Just having a 4K-capable GPU with an MSRP of $399 is astounding. It wasn’t too long ago that 4K was only possible by running a couple of cards in either Crossfire or SLI.
Initial benchmarks have shown Nvidia’s claims to be mostly true with almost all independant testers returning very similar results across the board. So far, the RTX 3060 Ti has been praised as “the card we need” and has received, on average, a 4.5/5 star rating… It’s just too bad that it’s impossible to come by unless you’re giving $700-$1000 to a scalper.
With any luck, manufacturing will kick into high-gear early in 2021 and we’ll see a wave of newly available Ampere GPUs like the RTX 3060 Ti.
