NVIDIA is about to “un-launch” the RTX 3050 8GB and replace it with a slower card. Uncle Jensen intends to make it more affordable by reducing the VRAM to 6GB. The reason is that it’s cannibalizing the sales of the GeForce RTX 4060. We all know that the RTX 4060 is considerably faster than the RTX 3050, but the identical VRAM size is enticing the less informed buyers towards the latter.
Reports from China indicate that the GeForce RTX 3050 is eating the RTX 4060’s lunch for breakfast. And because NVIDIA won’t reduce the price of the newer card, it has decided to widen the segmentation by discontinuing the RTX 3050 8GB, replacing it with a slower 6GB variant. It could also be that Team Green is preparing to launch the RTX 4050 and wants to make space for it.
Unfortunately for gamers, 8GB was already pushing it, as plenty of recent titles use up to 12GB of graphics memory at 1080p. To make matters worse, the 6GB variant of the RTX 3050 will likely come with a slimmer 96-bit bus (versus 128-bit on the 8GB) that reduces the bandwidth.
The GeForce RTX 3050 8GB features 2,560 FP32 shaders clocked at 1.77GHz (boost) alongside a 128-bit bus. The result is a memory bandwidth of 224GB/s. Reducing the bus to 96-bit would reduce it to just 168GB/s.
NVIDIA and its partners will wait for existing stocks to dry up, after which the 6GB model will replace the existing one. The latter is expected to hit the retail market in January.
