Following months of rumours and leaks, Senior VP of Nvidia’s GeForce division, Jeff Fisher, finally revealed the GeForce RTX 3050 GPU during the company’s CES 2022 special address. While the budget graphics card was the focal point for a large portion of the presentation, Fisher also shared the first official look at the “BFGPU” that is the RTX 3090 Ti.
The RTX 3050 is the first 50-class card to support ray tracing. This may sound rather pointless, given the kind of performance you might expect from a GPU of this calibre, but it also supports Nvidia DLSS. The AI upscaling technology should help boost fps and assist the budget card in handling ray traced graphics options at higher frame rates.
Sharing benchmarks from several games, all with ray tracing options enabled and other settings set to their highest values, the budget card looks quite capable. At 1080p, Nvidia claims the RTX 3050 is able to run games like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War at 60fps+ with DLSS enabled. Naturally, these figures will be cherry picked, so it’s worth waiting to see the real world performance later this month.
Pricing for the RTX 3050 starts at $249 USD / £239, but it’s unlikely that you’ll find the card at that price when it launches on January 27. Just like the recently released RTX 2060 12GB, there’ll be no Founders Edition versions of the card, nor will its availability be unaffected by the ongoing chip shortage.
Closing out the showcase, Fisher shared the first official look at the RTX 3090 Ti and shared some key specifications. It will feature 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, and 320 tensor teraflops of performance in addition to 24GB of 21Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. We can expect more details on the next best graphics card from Nvidia later this month.