Nvidia aims up at mainstream ray-tracing with RTX 3050 laptop GPUs
Nvidia has taken the wraps off its RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti GPUs, which it hopes will bring ray-tracing into the mainstream laptop market.
Both Ampere GPUs have power consumption ratings that sit between 35W to 80W, and have 4GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit interface. The less powerful RTX 3050 has 2048 CUDA cores, 64 tensor cores, and 16 ray-tracing cores. The RTX 3050Ti arrives with 2560 CUDA cores, 80 tensor cores, 20 ray tracing cores, and slightly lower clock speed of 1035MHz to 1695MHz.
By comparison, an RTX 3060 packs 3840 CUDA cores, 120 tensor cores, 30 ray tracing cores, 6GB of memory with a 192-bit interface, has a clock speed sitting between 1283MHz to 1703MHz, and sucks down 60 watts to 115 watts of power.
Laptops packing the GPUs will cost upwards of $800, and feature either Intel or AMD CPUs.
Nvidia is claiming up to twice the performance compared to its previous generation along with the ability to get 60 frames per second on various games with medium settings used.
The company added the hash rate of the GPUs will not be limited, unlike how it tried with its RTX 3060 drivers.
Besides the obvious gaming uses, Nvidia said the GPUs would have Broadcast support to apply AI enhancements to audio and video feeds, and video conferencing. Users will be able to use two beta effects to remove noise from audio and video inputs. Additionally, they will be able to remove the sound of cicadas and pets with more than multiple effects able to be used simultaneously with the May 11 update.
The company said the RTX 3050 GPUs provide seven times faster 4K video editing, and four times faster editing in Adobe Lightroom when compared to solely using the CPU.
For students, the GPUs would boost data science, artificial intelligence, and engineering workloads by between five to 40 times, it said. Last month, Nvidia unveiled its Grace Arm-based CPU for the data centre and its Omniverse Enterprise platform for 3D designers to collaborate and work on.
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