TECH NEWS – If the company also gives it weaker specifications than the previous model, as it has done before, then the product name will be misleading.

The consumer GPU industry has undergone significant changes in recent months due to the DRAM shortage. We have not only seen changes in product launch cycles, but also a deterioration in the retail availability of popular SKUs since then. As Nvidia struggles to manage its AI and consumer businesses, the company has a few options, one of which is to bring back older GPU models. According to South Korea’s Hankyung, Samsung Foundry is restarting production of the GeForce RTX 3060, meaning the model will soon be available.

Samsung Foundry played a key role in Nvidia‘s launch of Ampere GPUs in 2021 by providing an 8 nm manufacturing process. Samsung Foundry has also kept 8 nm production going more recently, as Nvidia placed orders tied to the Nintendo Switch 2 Tegra SoC, which uses the South Korean chip giant’s process node. This suggests that increasing the amount of Ampere silicon would not be difficult for Samsung Foundry, and it could also allow Nvidia to ease supply shortages.

Nvidia could reintroduce the GeForce RTX 3060 with a soft relaunch – or without any public announcement at all. The company could then push the narrative that this specific model, combined with DLSS 4.5, delivers amazing in-game performance and somehow meets consumer expectations for higher-performance gaming GPUs. In the short term, gamers who urgently need GPUs would have no trouble getting an RTX 3060, so this could work.

There has also been speculation that Nvidia will introduce the GeForce RTX 5050 with 9 GB of memory, suggesting that the company’s near-term plans in the consumer GPU market are far more varied than expected. Given how aggressive demand for DRAM and semiconductors is in the AI sector, Nvidia may not consider it reasonable to introduce an entirely new GPU series and dedicate supply to it.

And what was the point at the beginning? The RTX 3050 launched with 8 GB, then a stripped-down 6 GB model arrived – but it was still called the RTX 3050…

Source: WCCFTech, Hankyung