Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Nvidia’s most popular graphics card just bit the dust

By
The RTX 3060 installed in a computer.
Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

Nvidia is reportedly discontinuing the RTX 3060, which is easily one of the best graphics cards Nvidia has released in the past few years. The GPU is now over three years old, and Nvidia has apparently sent a notice to its board partners that the next order for these cards will be the last the company sends out.

The notice was posted on Board Channels, which is a forum where board partners discuss the internal movements of companies like Nvidia and AMD. Although Nvidia hasn’t confirmed that the RTX 3060 is being discontinued, it would make sense. The card was originally released in February 2021, and sales have likely declined in the face of newer cards like Nvidia’s own RTX 4060 and competitors like the Intel Arc A750.

Recommended Videos

The RTX 3060 stands as the most popular GPU on Steam, and it has for quite a few months. According to the latest Steam hardware survey, the RTX 3060 shows up in 5.71% of all gaming PCs. The GTX 1650, which is in second place, is found in 3.88% of gaming PCs. Although the RTX 3060 is massively popular, Nvidia’s newer RTX 4060 has been slowly crawling up the Steam hardware survey over the past few months, and it now shows up in 3.36% of gaming PCs.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

Board partners — the ones who actually release Nvidia’s GPUs — might be placing their final orders now, but it’ll take several months for the RTX 3060 to disappear from store shelves. Retailers are still likely getting shipments from board partners, and it’ll take a few months for Nvidia to send the final orders out to board partners. All of that is to say, although the RTX 3060 will slowly disappear from retailers, it won’t totally be gone for quite some time.

By the time the RTX 3060 is gone, Nvidia will likely have its RTX 5060 ready to go. We’ve seen rumors ramp up about Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs over the past few months, suggesting the generation will launch later this year. As we saw with the RTX 3060, a new card in this class will prop up the last-gen RTX 4060, and it will continue to rise in the Steam hardware survey.

Although the RTX 3060 remains the most popular graphics card around, it’s not exactly a great buy in 2024. Prices for the GPU haven’t significantly dropped, so you’ll spend around $300 for one today. At around that price, Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 are both better buys.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
AMD could swipe some of the best features of Nvidia GPUs
AMD logo on the RX 7800 XT graphics card.

Nvidia overwhelmingly dominates the list of the best graphics cards, and that largely comes down to its feature set that's been enabled through DLSS. AMD isn't sitting idly by, however. The company is researching new ways to leverage neural networks to enable real-time path tracing on AMD graphics cards -- something that, up to this point, has only really been possible on Nvidia GPUs.

AMD addressed the research in a blog post on GPUOpen, saying that the goal is "moving towards real-time path tracing on RDNA GPUs." Nvidia already uses AI accelerators on RTX graphics cards to upscale an image via DLSS, but AMD is focused on a slightly different angle of performance gains -- denoising.

Read more
The death of Moore’s Law is finally starting to stink
The back of the Core Ultra 9 285K CPU.

For more than two decades we've heard about the death of Moore's Law. It was a principle of the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, positing that the number of transistors in a chip would double about every two years. In 2006, Moore himself said it would end in the 2020s. MIT Professor Charles Leiserson said it was over in 2016. Nvidia's CEO declared it dead in 2022. Intel's CEO claimed the opposite a few days later.

There's no doubt that the concept of Moore's Law -- or rather observation, lest we treat this like some law of physics -- has lead to incredible innovation among desktop processors. But the death of Moore's Law isn't a moment in time. It's a slow, ugly process, and we're finally seeing what that looks like in practice.
Creative solutions

Read more
It’s finally time to stop buying Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs
RTX 3080 Ti in front of a window.

If you're looking for a budget GPU, the general advice is usually to buy from the previous generation of graphics cards. After all, as the new cards take over the market, the older ones are still waiting to be sold -- and while they're no longer among the best graphics cards, they're still perfectly acceptable alternatives.

We've now reached the point in the current generation of Nvidia GPUs where that advice no longer applies. If you want to get the best bang for your buck, it's time to stop buying Nvidia's RTX 30-series and look for other options.
The RTX 30-series arrived at the worst possible time

Read more