Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti VRAM and CUDA core count detailed by new leak

Multiple reports have speculated that Nvidia could lift the covers off the entry-level Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050Ti in the coming weeks, presumably at CES 2022. The cards will come as a breath of fresh air for budget-conscious builders. The overwhelming consensus was that both would use a cut-down version of the GA106 GPU as far as their actual specifications are concerned, which has now been confirmed by veteran leaker @kopite7kimi. There is, however, some bad news in the cards as well.

The leaker says that the GeForce RTX 3050 will run a GA106-140 GPU with 2304 CUDA cores and 4GB of VRAM. It somewhat contradicts an earlier leak (posted by kopite7kimi) that the graphics card would ship with 8GB of memory. On the other hand, the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti is expected to pack a GA106-150 GPU with 2560 CUDA cores and 8GB of VRAM. The extra VRAM alone should give the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti a significant advantage over AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, both of which are likely to feature 4GB of graphics memory.

However, the remarkable difference between the GeForce RTX 3050 and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti's VRAM could put off a lot of prospective customers for the former. Then again, one doesn't have much choice in the tumultuous times, so users will happily take what they can get. In terms of performance, we can expect the RTX 3050 Ti to trade blows with the RTX 2060, while the RTX 3050 could offer RTX GTX 1660 Ti level performance.

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