CES 2022 | Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 unveiled with 8GB VRAM and a US$249 starting price

Hot on the heels of AMD, who just unveiled its affordable Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, Nvidia has unleashed its solution for entry-level gaming rigs, the GeForce RTX 3050. Interestingly enough, it isn't accompanied by its Ti-branded sibling, a name that appeared on multiple leaks. Nonetheless, it is still a breath of fresh air for the GPU-starved masses.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 runs 8GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 VRAM on a 128-bit bus, giving us a total memory bandwidth of 224GB/s. It has 2,560 CUDA cores, 20 RT cores and 80 Tensor cores. The base clock speed is set at 1.55GHz and the boost clock at 1.8GHz. Lastly, the GeForce RTX 3050 has a TGP of 130W and needs a four-pin power connector. These specs are eerily similar to the now non-existent GeForce RTX 3050 Ti from earlier leaks.

Nvidia says that the GeForce RTX 3050 can easily breach the 60 FPS barrier in most modern-day AAA titles at 1080p. However, you may have to play around with a few settings and switch raytracing off. Oh, and you'll need a reasonably beefy CPU because Nvidia's test rig was running an Intel Core i9 processor. Nonetheless, it should serve as a decent upgrade from Pascal-era cards such as the GeForce RTX 1060.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 will cost US249 and sell on January 27. Its 8GB of VRAM makes it objectively better than AMD's similarly-specced offerings. However, it will also be the card's undoing, as it is the right amount for cryptocurrency mining. Furthermore, Nvidia won't be too keen on making many of these, as it would rather use the manufacturing capacity to make higher-end parts.