With the AMD Big Navi and Radeon RX 6000 series announced, it looks like Nvidia is looking to strike back at its red rival.

The folks at VideoCardz managed to get a rendering of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, further suggesting that an Ampere-based mainstream graphics card may be coming sooner than expected.

However, a number of leaks suggest it could appear this year, or at least a powered-up Ti version.

VideoCardz's renderings show a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in Gigabyte livery, with a fairly clean dual-fan design and some clever-looking copper heatpipes. And the card certainly has the whiff of a mainstream graphics workhorse; it's not as bulky and covered in angular accents as a high-end GeForce card.

It is expected to have 4,865 CUDA cores, 152 Tensor cores for machine learning, and 38 RT cores for ray tracing; it has 8GB of GDDR6 video memory and is said to run at 14Gbps; it has a 2.5GHz CPU speed, and is expected to be able to run at up to 10Gbps. In contrast, the card above it, the GeForce RTX 3070, has 5,888 CUDA cores, 184 Tensor cores, 46 RT cores, and also 8GB of GDDR6. [The RTX 3060 Ti is effectively less powerful than the RTX 3070. In other words, the RTX 3060 Ti will likely be able to run games at 4K resolution well enough, but you'll likely have to drop the settings a bit or turn everything up to run games at lower frame rates. games at 1440p resolution are quite popular among PC gamers, so the RTX 3060 Ti expected to focus on delivering killer performance at 1440p.

The RTX 3060 Ti is expected to cost around $400, which would be $100 less than the RTX 3070. It is worth noting here that AMD does not have a competing RDNA 2 graphics card under $500; the Radeon RX 6800 is $549 and appears to be chasing the GeForce RTX 3080. So if Nvidia releases the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti soon, it may be able to monopolize the mainstream graphics market.

We will have to wait and see what Nvidia does next and how AMD fights back.