Nvidia announces the $399 RTX 3060 Ti—and we’ve tested it

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  The RTX 3060 Ti. Like other Nvidia 3000-series GPUs, it includes one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports. [credit: Nvidia ]

New computer GPUs have launched at a furious pace the past few months, mostly in the $500-and-up sector. This week, we finally see a 2020 GPU arriving at a lower price than a brand-new gaming console: the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, priced at $399 and launching tomorrow, December 2.

But once again this year, Nvidia is leaving people in the dark about how many of these cards we can expect to reach stores. We know the company manufactured at least one of them, at any rate, because my review hardware arrived last week. The usual gamut of benchmarks confirms performance on par with last year's RTX 2080 Super, at nearly half the cost.

Like other RTX-branded GPUs, the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti features proprietary processing cores on its silicon-namely, its Tensor cores (for AI computation) and its RT cores (to manage all things ray tracing). To get to a $399 price, the 3060 Ti drops specs compared to its higher-ranked siblings in the usual categories, particularly CUDA cores, but it also severely drops its Tensor and RT core counts. Nvidia's trick here is that those core types have been updated since last year's model to do more work per core.

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