Nvidia is seemingly preparing a refreshed RTX 3050 graphics card with reduced VRAM capacity. The new GPU is expected to be paired with only 6GB of VRAM instead of the initial 8GB.
It seems that sources close to Nvidia’s board channels were notified regarding an imminent modification of the GeForce RTX 3050. The rumour states that Team Green is planning to cut a quarter of the GPU’s allocated memory. This means that RTX 3050 cards will regress from having 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM to 6GB – probably also GDDR6. This puts it on par with the refreshed RTX 3050 Mobile when it comes to VRAM.
“According to information from AIC brand manufacturers, the RTX 3050 8G version will be phased out as inventory is depleted, and the RTX 3050 6G version is expected to be available for purchase and potentially on the market by January.” — Board Channels.
However, it is unclear if Nvidia is also reducing the memory bus to 96-bit or improving it to 192-bit. The former is more likely as it allows the usage of only three 2GB chips.
As a reminder, the original RTX 3050 8GB graphics cards use the GA106 GPU featuring 2,560 CUDA cores and a 128-bit memory bus. This GPU came coupled with 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 VRAM offering 224GB/s of bandwidth. All of this sat at a low 130W TDP power rating, meaning no 12VHPWR connectors.
While we don’t have any official information, the reason for such a change could be that Nvidia wants something to fight in the under £200 range. Currently, the cheapest RTX 4000 GPU is the GeForce RTX 4060 at $300 / £287.99. Even the two-year-old RTX 3050 8GB is still at $219.99 / £213.07 for the cheapest model available. Meanwhile, the Red Team has its RX 6600 8GB at $200 / £184.99 and RX 6500 XT 4GB at $170 / £179.99.
