Nvidia is still committed to its stalwart RTX 3060, making the prospect of a truly budget Ada card ever more distant

pcgamer.com:

It's been nearly four years since Nvidia's original GeForce RTX 3060 first launched and despite the extra technology advancements brought in by the Ada Lovelace architecture, the evergreen mid-range card is still a popular choice. And now it looks like third-party vendors will keep on churning out new RTX 3060 models, with lower prices, thanks to a continued stream of chips from Nvidia.

The news that Nvidia is committed to shipping RTX 3060 chips through to the first quarter of next year, at the very least, was reported by Videocardz, and I have to say that's not a big surprise. The entire RTX 40-series has battled against constant criticism of being too expensive, not to mention that in the case of the RTX 4060, it wasn't massively faster than its predecessor.

At $299, its MSRP is better than the RTX 3060's $329 launch price, but that was during the pandemic, when everything PC-based was significantly more expensive than it should have been.

However, a quick search on Amazon will show you RTX 3060s as cheap as $289, whereas the newer RTX 4060 starts at the $300 mark. So if there's only an $11 difference between the two, why are third-party vendors still interested in creating new models on an old chip? I strongly suspect that Nvidia is selling the old Ampere GPUs at a really enticing price, which is probably why board partners are willing to carry out making new RTX 3060 models, with a drop in the MSRP too.

It's probably also a reaction to the fact AMD's last-gen Radeon RX 6000 cards are still selling well, especially the RX 6600 and RX 6700 XT. You can pick them up for around $190 and $310 respectively, so an RTX 3060 price at, say, $260 would be well received.

And there's one more reason for the RTX 3060's lifespan