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Zotac announces three RTX 3060 Ti with Ampere GA103 GPU
Hong Kong-based graphics card manufacturer Zotac has just released a new version of the RTX 3060 Ti. Since its release, it has been one of the hardest to buy of any GPU. The new 3060 Ti is equipped with a GA103 GPU, the same GPU used by the notebook RTX 3080 Ti. So far, all 3060 Tis come with a GA104 GPU.
All three cards are listed in ZOTAC Chinese website (pass through my driver). Zotac carefully added the X suffix to differentiate the GA103 card from the GA104 version. It goes one step further, denoting the specific GPU being used on each card’s specs page.
Performance should remain the same for the GA103 and GA104 versions of the 3060 Ti, which both have the same base specs, including 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 4,864 CUDA cores.
Zotac told us they don’t plan to sell these specific cards outside of China, but that certainly doesn’t rule out a future SKU release to global markets.
The GA103 sits between the GA102 and GA104 in Nvidia’s GPU lineup and appears to be developed for high-end gaming laptops. The GA102 used by the desktop RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 is not suitable for use in a laptop, and the GA104 is not powerful enough to provide flagship performance. The GA103 bridges this gap. It first caught our eye when it appeared on a pre-release geekbench listing as part of a high-end HP Omen laptop with a then-unannounced Alder Lake processor.
Compared to the GA104, the GA103 is a larger and more powerful GPU. Its 496 mm² size is significantly larger than the 392 mm² GA104. The notebook 3080 Ti has 7424 shaders enabled, which is slightly below the maximum possible 7680. This is much higher than the GA104’s maximum of 6144.
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Since the RTX 3060 Ti comes with 4864 shaders, it’s clear that Nvidia is using a massively harvested chip. It also means Nvidia will be able to use the GA103 chip with more unlocked shaders for future RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti variants, both of which use the GA104.
The fact that Nvidia chose to release the updated RTX 3060 Ti shows how popular it is as a mid-range gaming GPU (not that it costs like one!) and a great mining card. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Zotac and other suppliers follow suit and release the GA103-equipped 3060 Ti for the global market. Choosing to make the GA103 or GA104 model certainly helps alleviate the shortage of this popular model.