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Nvidia’s RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti could pick up from the GTX 1660 Ti and RTX 2060

Alleged specifications and benchmarks of upcoming laptop GPUs leaked

Nvidia Ampere or Hopper?

The future cheapest GPUs in Nvidia’s RTX 3000 range, the 3050 and 3050 Ti, could find their way inside the best gaming laptop very soon if a report from Notebookcheck is anything to go by. It claims Nvidia plans to release the cards in the next few months, and also shows benchmarks and specs for the cards.

The article claims both cards will pack 4GB of GDDR6 RAM, with 2,048 and 2,560 CUDA cores for the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti respectively. For comparison, the current entry-level RTX 3060 bears 3,584. It’s not yet known if the 3050 series will stay exclusive to laptops, or whether desktop models are also in the works.

Despite the low specs on paper, the reported benchmarks from Notebookcheck show a pretty impressive performance at 1080p resolution, with both cards breaking the 60fps barrier on Shadow of the Tomb Raider at ultra settings. Both in-game and in 3DMark tests, the 3050 Ti seems to match the previous generation RTX 2060 Max-Q, while the 3050 sees similar performance to the GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

If desktop models are planned too, they could come with different specs than the mobile variants. After all, the RTX 3050 Ti was previously spotted on a prebuilt PC with 6GB rather than 4GB of VRAM, and the mobile version of the RTX 3080 is closer to the desktop RTX 3070 in performance rather than its direct counterpart.

If these benchmarks are to be believed, our best graphics card guide could shortlist a desktop model as the ideal budget gaming GPU. Only time will tell.