It looks like the RTX 3050 is finally going to be discontinued only to be replaced by a worse RTX 3050. Because…umm, reasons?

pcgamer.com:

With its second birthday barely a month away, news that Nvidia is purportedly going to discontinue the GeForce RTX 3050 isn't surprising, as eventually all GPUs get replaced. But the rumour here is an odd one, as it contends a 'new' RTX 3050 will be introduced, with less VRAM and with a much lower power limit. Because that's exactly what the budget PC gaming sector really needs right now: worse last-gen cards.

We spotted the story on the RTX 3050 apparently going bye-bye over at BenchLife.info, with the wording of the rumour appearing on Videocardz. The source for the information is Board Channels, a website that aggregates hints and other snippets from graphics card vendors, and it states the slowest GPU in Nvidia's Ampere range is set to be discontinued.

The exact date is unspecified but it will probably align with its replacement: the GeForce RTX 3050. Yes, that's right: Another one.

Except this one will reportedly be worse, as the leak suggests that it will lose 2GB of VRAM and its external power connector. That means it will have a maximum TDP of 75W, getting all of its current through the PCI Express slot, and sport a miserable 6GB of GDDR6 memory.

It will probably still use the same GA106 chip that powers the RTX 3060, but it's likely to just be the very worst ones from the chip binning process. The current RTX 3050 sports 2,560 shaders, a boost clock of 1,777MHz, and 8GB of VRAM on a 128-bit memory bus. It has a TDP (thermal design power) of 130W, so the only way it's going to work at 75W is by having fewer shaders and/or a lower boost clock.

Having less VRAM will help but given that GDDR6 doesn't use much power, the bulk of the power limit reduction will have to come from reducing the RTX 3050's rendering