(Credit: PCMag)
Nvidia is rumored to be reviving its RTX 3060 design from almost five years ago, amid ongoing price hikes for the latest-gen hardware and decreasing availability due to memory shortages.
While Nvidia halted production of the old midrange GPU in 2024, it has reportedly told partners to expect new stock of the card in the future, VideoCardz reports.
The RTX 3060 originally launched in February 2021 and became part of a wider range of Ti, VRAM quantity variants, plus a low-hash-rate (LHR) model designed to thwart cryptocurrency mining. (Remember when that was the only problem we had with GPU availability and pricing?)
After years of being a mainstay in pre-built PCs, Nvidia initially told partners that it would run out of these cards by the end of 2024, stating that they would receive no further shipments in 2025. Over a year on, though, things have changed. With memory shortages causing issues throughout just about every industry, leaker hongxing2020 now claims on X that the RTX 3060 is coming back in Q1 of this year.
The leak doesn't go into any particular detail, so we don't know whether this will be the 8GB (with a 128-bit bus) version of the card, or the 12GB variant (with its 192-bit bus); the latter would certainly garner more interest in 2026. The RTX 3060 is still the most popular graphics card on Steam, so it can play many of the most popular games. There are plenty of popular cards on that list with weaker performance, making the 3060 a potentially decent upgrade.
With the Steam Machine just around the corner, too, having a viable dedicated GPU alternative might be beneficial to many of Nvidia's partners.
Its use of older GDDR6 memory and an 8nm process node could help Nvidia avoid the shortages currently facing the latest generation GPUs and other hardware. But with memory companies pivoting from DDR supply to low-power DDR and HBM, that might not make as big an impact as we'd like.
Even if Nvidia can produce enough of this card to make a significant difference in current GPU pricing and availability issues, it will need to significantly reduce the cost. The RTX 5050 has decent availability at around $250. The RTX 3060 is at least 15% slower than that card, so anything over $200 would be dead in the water. A $190 GPU that can handle 1080p gaming with 12GB of VRAM, though? That could end up as a killer card in this messy 2026 GPU economy.