Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, launched last week, is the company’s first close-to-midrange entry in its RTX 3000 Series of graphics cards. Based on Nvidia’s new “Ampere” graphics architecture and with a huge increase in core count, these cards run laps around their predecessors. They’re actually so fast that the first one we reviewed, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition (Nvidia’s own classy reference design), surpassed the company’s formerly elite GeForce RTX 2080 in many of our tests. It even came close to matching the stratospheric GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in some instances.
Unfortunately it’s 2020, and the popularity of PC gaming (particularly, I’m-stuck-at-home PC gaming) has seemingly hit an all-time high. All of Nvidia’s new RTX 3000 Series graphics cards have seen initial stocks disappear in a flash, with subsequent availability spotty and scarce, like that of the newly released gaming consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Due to this, it’s unlikely that you will be able to buy a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti anytime soon without some concerted hunting and a quick trigger finger on the Buy button, even though the cards are technically now available for purchase. Cards get hoovered up as quickly as they go on sale. (Check out our advice for landing some of the season’s toughest-to-find tech.)
Let’s look at all of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards that were released at launch and divvy up the pack for the time (and it will come) when there’s a selection to choose among. The usual suspects certainly created quite a variety.
