When the RTX 30 series dropped sometime in 2020, demand shot through the roof due to its relative performance value as compared to its 20 series predecessors. The lowest you could go for ray tracing performance was formerly the RTX 3060 at $329 which was already a bargain if you could snag one at that price in the real world. Now the graphics card manufacturer wants to make this cutting-edge technology even more accessible with the Nvidia RTX 3050 at $249, a whopping $80 cheaper.

Nvidia mentioned in their release article that their GTX 50 series GPUs have historically given the best bang-for-the-buck, which led to their popularity in the market as proven by Steam statistics to this day. With the passage of time though, the GTX 1050 (which was released in 2016) and 1650 (2019) can no longer play today’s games at 60 FPS.

Given the fact that the Nvidia RTX 3050 is an R series instead of a GTX, it comes with 2nd-generation Ray Tracing technology. It also packs Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), allowing games to be played at lower resolutions while having the AI make up for the difference while using up a smaller allocation of processing power.

For serious gamers, latency can spell the difference between victory and defeat. With that in mind, Nvidia has also further developed their Reflex software, providing minimal response time to provide hardcore gamers with an advantage.

Number-conscious prospective customers, this list is for you: The RTX 3050 comes with 2560 CUDA Cores at 1.78GHz Boost Clock speeds and 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

Considering the global chip shortage as well as the overall situation with the other RTX 30 series cards (at least double in retailer pricing, shortage, long lines, crypto rumors, etc.), we hope that this falls into the hands of gamers who want to use it for its intended purpose.