Nvidia’s latest mobile RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3050 GPUs are here.
The cards will support the latest CPUs from Intel and AMD, of course, and will support ray tracing and DLSS-enabled games—everything anyone with a current-gen or last-gen RTX card has been able to enjoy, but this time the laptops that ship with the latest cards will start at $799. Both graphics cards will be included in more than 140 different models from manufactures like Razer, Alienware, MSI, Asus, Lenovo, Dell, and HP for both gamers and content creators.
Compared to the last gaming laptop I bought several years ago with a GTX 1050 Ti for more than $1,000, the starting price is rather exciting (assuming stock isn’t hit too bad due to the ongoing chip shortage), especially because Nvidia’s RTX 30-series cards promise leaps and bounds better performance over their 20-series predecessors.
Nvidia said a graphically demanding game like Control can reach about 65 frames per second with the RTX 3050 Ti with DLSS on at 1080p, medium graphics. At the same settings, other games like Watchdogs Legion, Minecraft, and Outriders can reach up to the same or a bit higher, and Call of Duty: Warzone can get close to 100 fps.
During a press briefing, Nvidia said the RTX 3050 has 64 tensor cores and 16 ray tracing (RT) cores, and the RTX 3050 Ti has 80 tensor cores and 20 RT cores. Both GPUs have a 4GB frame buffer, which is a portion of the VRAM that drives the video display. Both also have a 128-bit memory bus.
With that in mind, I don’t want to get too excited for these new GPUs just yet. Compared to the RTX 2060 mobile GPU, for instance, the specs aren’t as impressive; the RTX 2060 has 240 Tensor cores and 30 RT cores. Judging by that alone, the RTX 3050 will have about half the ray tracing performance as the RTX 2060, and the gap of non-ray tracing performance between the RTX 2060 and RTX 3050 seems like it will be large as well, especially with that memory bus and frame buffer size.
Nvidia did not give any more information regarding specs during the press briefing.
The exact pricing and release date of new laptops configured with either 3050 cards depends on each individual company, but some might be available as of today. Watch this space for specific announcements.