Is Nvidia planning to... reproduce the GeForce RTX 3060?

Nvidia and Samsung are planning to restart production of the RTX 3060 GPU to bring back an affordable yet powerful graphics card option amidst the current surge in component prices.

According to sources, Nvidia is expected to restart production of its popular GeForce RTX 3060 gaming GPU in an attempt to provide PC gamers with an affordable yet relatively powerful graphics card upgrade in the coming months.

For those still using older GTX generation graphics cards, perhaps the RTX 2060 or RTX 3050, the RTX 3060 offers a low-cost performance upgrade option that still features Nvidia's latest DLSS 4.5 technology, except for frame rate capabilities.

The RTX 3060 was one of the best graphics cards of 2024, offering a significant performance upgrade over the RTX 2060, with considerably better Ray Tracing capabilities. However, it's now nearly five years old and has been replaced by the RTX 4060 and RTX 5060 in subsequent years. But for gamers still using older components, this could be a welcome lifeline in today's expensive market.

The key to this move is that Nvidia will be using Samsung to manufacture its GPUs, instead of TSMC. TSMC is considered the world's most advanced silicon chip manufacturer today, and has produced many recent generations of Nvidia GPUs. However, TSMC is operating at full capacity, busy producing everything from Apple phone chips to Nvidia's massive AI GPUs. In contrast, Samsung has sufficient capacity to produce these chips, using the same 8nm manufacturing process that was originally used to produce the RTX 3000 series.

X

Rumors about this move have been circulating since at least January of this year, but now the South Korean economic news site, Korea Economic Daily, has confirmed that Samsung has restarted its 8nm production line to fulfill Nvidia's order.

What remains unconfirmed is the exact configuration of the upcoming 'new' RTX 3060 GPU. Initially, the card came with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, via a 192-bit memory bus. However, later versions have reduced this to 8GB of VRAM and used a narrower 128-bit bus, resulting in significantly lower performance (around 20%).

Since the supply of RAM – including VRAM – is a major reason for the current high price of PC components, it makes sense for new cards to have lower VRAM configurations. However, it's also possible that there's enough GDDR6 in stock to meet the production demand for higher-configuration cards.

It remains unconfirmed whether these graphics cards will be sold at lower prices than before. The 3060 is virtually sold out at all retail chains, but used cards are selling for around $250 on eBay, while new RTX 4060 cards sell for around $300. Therefore, we expect that the reborn RTX 3060 will be priced under $200.