The RTX 30 series is about to get a little more affordable, as Nvidia today announced the RTX 3060 graphics card with 12GB of GDDR6 memory, due out in late February.

As Nvidia is eager to mention, the RTX 3060 is a card that offers the latest Ampere architecture and all the goodies that come with it, and should be an appropriate upgrade for those still using 10 series cards.

This is raw performance of 13 shader TFLOPS, 25 RT TFLOPS, and 101 tensor TFLOPS. Where this GPU fits into the overall performance of the 30 series can be easily guessed by referring to the RTX 3060 Ti review and working backwards from there. However, its large memory buffer will have the final say in some benchmarks.

This card has been rumored quite heavily for some time now, baffling everyone with its 12GB GDDR6 memory. This is larger than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, with a slimmer 192-bit memory bus, but both have 8GB of GDDR6; even larger than the 10GB RTX 3080, but with faster GDDR6X memory on the high-end cards, and overall memory bandwidth is significantly improved.

The shift to 12GB is often seen as a response to the larger memory capacity of AMD's RX 6000 series, but Nvidia is unlikely to talk about it.

Whatever the reason for the plentiful VRAM, the RTX 3060 12GB is sure to be a great gaming card at a more affordable price than Ampere is currently offering. Expect a lot of demand when it goes on sale next month.