Is three years too soon to stop making one of the most popular GPUs these days?" According to one report, Nvidia is preparing to distribute the final lot of GA106 graphics processors, the chips that drive the GeForce RTX 3060, and if that is the case , the jolly green giant has officially closed the door on the GPU that has topped the Steam hardware charts for years.

The GeForce RTX 3060, released in early 2021, stood out for all the right reasons. At the time, the global supply of graphics cards was in extremely short supply thanks to the global pandemic and crypto-miners taking over all the GPUs in the world.

With an MSRP of $329 at launch, the RTX 3060 was the cheapest Ampere-powered model at the time, despite its 12GB of VRAM. However, it was not an instant success, especially when compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, as its performance was not brilliant enough.

But it was a GPU, and at the time it was more than adequate. In the years that followed, however, the RTX 3060 quickly gained popularity and has been topping Steam's hardware survey charts for years.

Board Channels (via Videocardz) reports that Nvidia has stated that this model has been officially discontinued and that it will be the last few lots of GA106 GPUs.

Its successor, the RTX 4060, still has a long way to go before it becomes the most popular GPU among Steam users. This is because the aforementioned RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and the Turing-powered GTX 1650 are all considerably more popular than the RTX 4060.

While the $299 MSRP at launch was cheaper than the RTX 3060, the fact that it only comes with 8GB of VRAM did not sit well with many reviewers and PC gamers.

At face value, the RTX 4060 is a truly excellent 1080p graphics card, especially considering its full DLSS 3.5 support and excellent NVENC video encoder. However, it feels more like an RTX "4050" rather than a 60-class GPU, and would have been far better received had Nvidia marketed it that way and priced it accordingly.

Imagine if the original RTX 4070 had been sold as the RTX 4060.

Fortunately, the RTX 3060 is still in stock at many retailers and will actually be around a bit longer; once Nvidia releases the RTX 5060, the price will probably drop significantly, but that won't happen until January 2025 at the earliest.

If you are looking for a really good GPU for under $300, you are much better off buying the Radeon RX 6750 XT. It was overpriced when it first came out, but it is much cheaper now, and at 1080p, it will give the RTX 4060 Ti plenty of performance, unless you enable ray tracing in your games.