The GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range graphics card that comes with a configuration of a GA106 GPU equipped with 2560 shaders. Specifically, it is a cut-down version of the said graphics core, which is also present in the GeForce RTX 3060 and that it has 3,584 shaders in the said graphics solution.

As we can see, there is a significant shader difference between the two graphics cards, despite both using the same GPU. As we said, this is because the GeForce RTX 3050 uses a heavily trimmed version of the GA106while the GeForce RTX 3060 has a version that has almost all active shaders (3,584 out of a total of 3,840).

This is standard practice by both NVIDIA and AMD. Both use trimmed down versions of the GPU take advantage of graphics cores that have had more limited success on the waferand that they didn’t come out with all shaders (or FP32 units) working. Not only does it allow you to get the most out of the chips you get per wafer, but you also reduce development and design costs by using the same GPU on different graphics cards.

The fact is that sometimes there can be changes in graphics cards that used a specific GPU, and which suddenly, without any explanation, start using a different graphics core. This is also normal as it occurs due to a simple matter of cleaning the GPU stock and this time it touched the GeForce RTX 3050.

Our colleague Eduardo already told us yesterday in this article, where we saw that MSi launched the GeForce RTX 3050, which uses the GA107 GPU instead of the GA106. This change is more important than it might seem a priori, because it allowed not only to reduce the TGP cards from 130 watts to 115 watts, but the power connector has also been changed than going from 8-pin to 6-pin.

This is a clear improvement in terms of efficiency, as there was no need to reduce the shader count of the graphics card it uses complete GA107 core (2,560 active shaders) and work speeds of the previous model have been retained. This graphics card is a better choice than the original and will be marketed as GeForce RTX 3050 VENTUS 2X 8GB OC V1.

Ideally for users, both NVIDIA and AMD would use the most suitable graphics core for their graphics cards from the start for consumption and performance reasons. In this case, NVIDIA should have used the GA107 chip in its GeForce RTX 3050 from the startbut it didn’t because the priority is they release those graphics chips that come with broken SM drivesor that they are unable to work stably with all these activated units.