The Nvidia RTX 30-series never got an entry-level graphics card model, though that looks like it could change very soon with the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU.
As spotted by VideoCardz, someone submitted a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti-powered laptop to the public GPU-Z database, revealing all of the card’s specs in the process. As expected, these figures point to a GPU that’s designed for affordable gaming power on a 1080p screen.
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Packing 4GB of GDDR6 memory, the RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU was evidently tested as part of a laptop built by Taiwanese manufacturer Clevo. The card is listed with a 1,222MHz base clock speed and a 1,485MHz boost clock, unsurprisingly making it the slowest of the RTX 30-series so far. By comparison, the laptop version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 features 6GB of GDDR6 and clock speeds that can boost up to 1,703MHz.
This leak also backs up previous reports that both the RTX 3050 Ti and its even lower-end sibling, the RTX 3050, will use a new Nvidia GA107 graphics processor. This GPU is rumored to feature 2,560 CUDA cores, the same number listed in the GPU-Z report.
One thing we still don’t know about is the potential inclusion of RT cores, which help fuel ray-tracing performance on everything from the RTX 3060 to the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090. The RTX 3050 series’ predecessors, the GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Ti, went without RT cores as ray tracing in general wasn’t deemed a concern for budget buyers at the time.
With the RTX 30-series, however, ray-tracing performance has improved massively, so we’re hopeful that the cheapest cards will come equipped for it too. The fact that Nvidia is using RTX branding instead of GTX could be a hint that’s where these entry-level GPUs are headed.
All that said, this leak only covers the mobile version of the RTX 3050 Ti, not the RTX 3050, and we’re still waiting for more on their desktop counterparts too. For now Nvidia’s focus appears on new high-end cards like the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, so even if the RTX 3050 variants aren’t too far off, expect their launch to be a quieter affair.
