Zotac unveils three GeForce RTX 3060 Ti variants with a GA103 GPU

Rumours about a new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti variant with a GA103 GPU have been around for some time now. Evidence of the questionably-specced card first emerged in Nvidia's drivers. It was, for the most part, pure speculation until now. Zotac has launched three new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti variants powered by the aforementioned GPU.

Mydrivers (via @momomo_us) spotted the SKUs in question on Zotac's official website. One way to differentiate between a GA104 and GA103 model is via the model number, which adds an extra "-X" at the end. For example, the Zotac RTX 3060Ti-8GD6 Apocalypse GOC becomes the Zotac RTX 3060Ti-8GD6 X-GAMING GOC-X and so on. Alternatively, one could also look at the spec sheet, which clearly highlights the new GA103-200 GPU.

As speculated earlier, the GA103 powered GeForce RTX 3060 Ti shares the same specs with its GA104 sibling, meaning that you get the same 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 4,864 CUDA cores. Nvidia's decision to make a last-minute GPU swap on the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a genius move. It allows Nvidia to repurpose the GA103 GPUs that didn't make it as a laptop GeForce RTX 3080 Ti into desktop-grade parts. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti has been notorious for its low supply, and this could help abate some of the shortages.

However, there is bound to be some performance difference between the GA103 and GA104 versions of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and it should be minimal, on paper at least. As far as availability goes, only Zotac seems to have made the transition for now, that too only in the Chinese market. However, it shouldn't be long before other AIB partners follow suit.