12/28/2023 0 Comments Geforce looking for next available rig![]() The experience with Fermi was so traumatic for Nvidia that the company decided that it would get to the 28nm node right alongside AMD in early 2012. While newer nodes offered better efficiency, performance, and density, they were also much more expensive to use, and there were often "teething pains." By the mid 2000s, Nvidia's main strategy was to make big GPUs on older nodes, which often was enough to put GeForce in first place. For most of the 2000s, Nvidia lagged behind Radeon (owned first by ATI and then AMD) when it came to nodes. Things were so bad that Nvidia rushed out a second version of Fermi and the GTX 500-series before 2010 ended, which thankfully resulted in a more efficient product.įermi doubtlessly caused Nvidia to do a little soul searching, and the company rethought its traditional strategy. First featured in the GTX 480 in mid-2010, Fermi was not what Nvidia needed as it only offered a modest performance boost over the 200-series while consuming tons of power. It's rare for Nvidia to make a serious mistake, but one of its worst was the Fermi architecture. It's a pity the RTX 4060 threw most of that progress away. Beyond pricing and availability issues, it was a great card that certainly gave AMD a run for the money. It was also uniquely good among the rest of the 30-series, which was almost always way too expensive and/or paired with not nearly enough VRAM to make much sense. ![]() Still, the RTX 3060 stands as one of Nvidia's best midrange GPUs ever. Additionally, FSR 2.0 offered quality and performance improvements that made it more competitive with DLSS, further reducing the 3060's advantage. The 3060 never quite reached its MSRP of $329, while the 66 XT both fell well below $300 in time. Eventually the shortage subsided in 2022, and that made the 3060 one of the most affordable GPUs. Of course, the GPU shortage was a thing, and the RTX 3060 wasn't immune - even with Nvidia's first "self-owned" attempt at locking out Ethereum mining. AMD competed pretty well against the rest of the 30-series and usually had a VRAM capacity advantage, but the Navi 23 cards were the exception. The RX 66 XT had decent horsepower but only 8GB of VRAM, had to rely on inferior FSR 1.0 upscaling instead of DLSS, and came out months later. What was even more remarkable was how AMD's competing midrange cards, which were normally quite potent, weren't all that powerful. (We should also note that we're not including the gimped RTX 3060 8GB in this discussion.) Such a big improvement gen-on-gen was pretty remarkable for Nvidia. That was more VRAM than even the regular RTX 3080 with its 10GB (though there was a 3080 12GB that wasn't really available). It was significant step up from the RTX 2060 in performance, and most notably had double the VRAM at 12GB. Nvidia doesn't always nail its midrange offerings, but the RTX 3060 was a great exception. Given that anyone would buy a GPU with a pulse in 2021, Nvidia didn't really have to put much effort into a new GPU, but it surprised everyone with the RTX 3060. The midrange was particularly important, as the prior RTX 20-series with its RTX 20 Super weren't exactly amazing follow ups to the GTX 1060. Nevertheless, in the months following the launch of the 30-series in late 2020, Nvidia continued to add new models to the lineup, working its way down the performance stack. ![]() It was hard to find a 30-series GPU at anything close to MSRP - or any graphics card of the time, for that matter. In practice, retail pricing was nowhere near where it should have been. It featured a more fleshed out architecture with improved ray tracing and tensor cores, it offered tons more raw performance, and it even returned to an attractive pricing structure. On paper, the RTX 30-series sounded pretty good in 2020.
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