If I ask you how many versions of the GeForce RTX 3060 there are, you’d probably tell me two, one with 12 GB of graphics memory and a 192-bit bus, and the other with 8 GB of graphics memory and a 128-bit bus. You are not right, but we should add to these two third version using GA104 GPU instead of GPU GA106.

That’s a bigger difference than it might seem, since that GPU change affects the specs of the GeForce RTX 3060. The version based on the GA106 GPU has a configuration 48 raster unitsalso known as ROPs, while the GA104 GPU variant has 64 raster units.

Thanks to this improvement included in the GPU, the performance of the GeForce RTX 3060 with the GA104 GPU improves noticeably in professional applications and excels especially in rendering tasks. For example, in Blender this model is up to 20% faster than the version based on the GA106 graphics core.

The rest of the specifications remain, that means this model has 3,584 shaders and has 12GB of GDDR6 15GHz memory on a 192-bit bus, which means it won’t make a significant performance difference in games compared to the 48-raster model. In any case, it’s a relevant change that’s worth keeping in mind, especially if you’re thinking about buying a GeForce RTX 3060.

I remind you that the GA104 GPU is the same one that NVIDIA used in GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and that, thanks to a different maximum shader configuration, it can keep more raster units activated with 3,584 active shaders out of the total 6,144 that said GPU has.

If you’re wondering why NVIDIA made this GPU change, I think it’s very likely that it’s a simple stock issue, i.e. the green ones are trying to clear a large number of GA104 chips which was not obtained from a wafer ready for integration into a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or better. You already know that chips that don’t have a specific number of functional shaders can be reused to revive inferior solutions.