Nvidia has taken the covers off its new $329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, aimed at mainstream gamers and those looking to upgrade from the GeForce GTX 1060

The new card follows in the footsteps of the powerful $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090 flagship, the $699 4K-centric GeForce RTX 3080, the $499 GeForce RTX 3070, and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, a $399 GPU and is a very difficult GPU to purchase

Here is what we know so far about the forthcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060

The GeForce RTX 3060 will arrive in late February; Nvidia has not said anything more specific than that [However, new leaks indicate that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be released on February 25 And in some places the card is available early When we asked Nvidia about this, they told us that they have yet to make an official announcement about the release date However, it seems certain that it will be released on February 25

We can only hope that this graphics card will be easier to purchase than other GPUs in the GeForce RTX 30 series, which are very hard to find in stock

The GeForce RTX 3060 starts at $329, which is actually cheaper than the RTX 2060 at launch, which started at $349

With the performance that the GeForce RTX 3060 promises, this lower price is rather attractive And AMD has yet to announce a graphics card that offers the same performance for the same price or less; Nvidia could be the winner here

The GeForce RTX 3060 sits slightly below the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with 3,584 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6 video memory, a boost clock speed of 178GHz, and a 192-bit memory interface

Compared to the GeForce GTX 1060, which many Nvidia fans are expected to upgrade to, it has twice the raster performance and 10 times the ray tracing performance

With this in mind, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is expected to target high-fidelity, high-frame-rate games at 1080p to 1440p resolutions Games are expected to run at frame rates in excess of 60 frames per second with all graphics settings maxed out In addition, very demanding games will run at 120 frames per second or higher by lowering some settings or dropping the resolution to 1080p

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is certainly the graphics card that PC gamers with a modest budget have been waiting for; at $329, it has no real competitor to AMD and still offers many potential benefits

AMD will almost certainly have to compete with the affordable Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, but that may still be months away

In other words, Nvidia may have a killer mainstream graphics card on its hands However, we will have to wait and see if the GeForce RTX 3060 will be available in sufficient numbers