In addition to teasing its new flagship beast, the RTX 3090 Ti, NVIDIA also another desktop GPU -- on the lower end. The GeForce RTX 3050 is said to offer both RTX and DLSS gaming on modern titles with a frame-rate target of 60fps.

It's positioned as a follow up to the GeForce GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, and the GTX 1650. This is important to factor in because these three GPUs represent some of the most popular graphics cards out there as per Steam's latest hardware survey. As much as we all covet the top-of-the-line RTX 3080s and RTX 3090s of the world, most PCs out there are budget conscious - which makes this announcement very exciting.

What sets the GeForce RTX 3050 apart from being a beefed up version of what's come before is the addition of full RTX and DLSS support thanks to NVIDIA's Ampere architecture.

As per the following chart, with both ray-tracing and DLSS, you can expect 1080p 60fps performance with high settings. Though this isn't really a performance comparison in that none of the GTX cards support DLSS.

In addition to featuring 8GB of DDR6 memory, the RTX 3060 can hit 18 TFLOPS of ray-tracing, 73 TFLOPS of AI tensor, and 9 TFLOPS of shader performance. How it compares to the RTX 3060 will have to wait until launch. Speaking of launch, like the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA won't be releasing a Founders Edition for the GeForce RTX 3050 - but partner cards from MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, Zotac, PNY, and others are expected to hit retailers on January 27 with a price "starting at $249 USD". Local pricing is still TBC.