A mid-range Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is almost certain to arrive to complement the high-end graphics cards in the GeForce RTX 3000 series. And to combat AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, the RTX 3060 Ti seems likely to appear in late October.

At least two sources told Videocardz that a mid-range Ampere GeForce graphics card is on the way, with the AMD Big Navi set to target the GeForce RTX 3080, a second Navi 22 GPU is also expected and could be aimed at mid-range gaming. Therefore, Nvidia needs a new next-generation GeForce GPU to keep this in check.

With Nvidia's Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards, the graphics giant will first release a trio of high-end GPUs, followed by solid mid-range graphics cards that offer solid performance and ray tracing support GeForce RTX 2060 was released. So it is almost certain that Nvidia will do the same with the RTX 3000 series.

However, it would seem a bit odd for Nvidia to release the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ahead of the vanilla RTX 3060. But something even stranger is happening.

Incidentally, October is the month in which the GeForce RTX 3070 is released, so there is an argument that someone may have confused it with the RTX 3060 Ti. However, as our colleagues at TechRadar explained, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is set to use a downgraded version of the GPU found at the heart of the RTX 3070, so it might make sense for both to launch in the same month. RTX 3060 is a different GPU chip, which is expected to use a chip that may not yet be in production. [We're not sure if this will be the case, as AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, which will be revealed in full on October 28, are likely to be quite powerful. Team Red's new RDNA 2 architecture promises significant performance gains over the older RNDA GPU architecture, and RDNA 2 graphics are also at the heart of the PS5 and Xbox Series X

. So not only will we see a graphics battle between the high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and AMD's Big Navi, but there could also be a battle to be fought in the mid-range graphics arena. This is good news for PC gamers. This is good news for PC gamers, because competition will create innovation and price reductions, meaning that better graphics cards will be offered at more attractive prices.