ASUS support reveals a 12GB RTX 3060 Strix graphics card

ASUS’ RTX 3060 12GB Strix was revealed on ASUS’ support website alongside their RTX 3080 Ti Strix, both of which are due to be announced within the next few months. 

Nvidia’s RTX 3060 is due to offer gamers a 192-bit memory bus, allowing the graphics card to ship with 12GB and 6GB GDDR6 memory configurations using GDDR6 memory. Right now, Nvidia is expected to ship both 6GB and 12GB versions of this graphics card to customers, though the 6GB version may also ship with fewer CUDA cores, assuming Nvidia uses the same tactic as their 10th generation GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1060 3GB graphics cards. 

AMD’s RX 6700 series of graphics cards will reportedly feature 12GB of VRAM, making Nvidia’s 12GB RTX 3060 a hard counter to AMD’s next-generation offerings. 

Is 12GB of VRAM necessary? 

As always, predicting the future of gaming hardware is a tricky prospect. Developers now have a new set of consoles to utilise, and that will change the way that future games utilise PC hardware. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X offer users 16GB of combined memory, giving their CPU and GPU hardware access to a lot of data. 

As games start to fully utilise these new consoles, the VRAM requirements of PC games will start to rise, so much so that 6GB graphics cards may suffer from performance issues in some games unless gamers lower their graphics settings. GPUs with more VRAM could be seen as being more “future-proof”, though it remains to be seen how long it will be before this extra VRAM allocation matters in mainstream PC games.