Amid an incredibly busy 12 months for hardware launches, the battle between Nvidia and AMD's new graphics cards is proving to be a long and complex one. After announcing and launching the RTX 30 Series and RX 6000 Series respectively, both companies are working hard to ensure the next cards in each series will be competitive. A new leak supports rumors that Nvidia's first budget RTX 30 Series card will be a comparative powerhouse.

The leak comes from hardware site Videocardz, and provides images, specifications, and benchmarks for the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, as well as an expected price of $399. The card will feature a cut down version of the GA-104 chip that powers the $499 RTX 3070, featuring 4864 CUDA cores compared to the 5888 of the more expensive card. The clock speeds will be slightly slower, running at 1410 MHz base clock and 1665 MHz boost clock, compared to 1500 Mhz base clock and 1725 MHz boost clock for the RTX 3070.

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When combined with the same 8 GB GDDR6 memory of the RTX 3070, the result is a card that performs better than the RTX 2080 Super, which currently retails from $649 to over $1000. Charts reportedly from Nvidia show the new card outperforming the 2080 Super by up to 54% in rasterizing, up to 54% in ray tracing, and up to 80% in rendering. The performance shown in the leaked charts suggests that the $399 RTX 3060 Ti will even be able to trade blows with the former flagship RTX 2080 Ti card in some titles.

RTX 3060 Ti Image Leak

While the new card will obviously be less powerful than the fuller featured RTX 3070, it appears that the performance will not be as far off as many would expect, far exceeding the previous generation RTX 2060 Ti. Given the stronger performance per dollar that AMD claims to offer with the RX 6000 Series so far, it makes sense for Nvidia to avoid cutting back too far. As games become better optimized for the new architecture, performance of the new cards is also likely to improve further compared to the old ones.

With AMD's RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT on the horizon, as well as Nvidia's RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 Ti, it is impossible to know yet which of the budget and mid range gaming cards will be the best buy. Though with both AMD and Nvidia competing hard to offer strong performance value, gamers will hopefully have plenty of choice available. As with all the new generation of graphics card, stock availability and scalpers inflating prices may be the biggest barriers to those looking to upgrade.

However, with both Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and AMD's RX 6700 not rumored to launch until at least January 2021, gamers can hope that the companies will reduce the problem by building large piles of stock over Christmas and the New Year.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is expected to launch in early 2021.

MORE: Nvidia's Boosted RTX 3080 Ti Revealed in Leak

Source: Videocardz