NVIDIA RTX 3060
Ampere · 2021
The laptop RTX 3060 is a notably more capable chip than its desktop-adjacent naming might suggest, with 3840 Ampere cores, 6GB of GDDR6 and a wide 192-bit memory bus feeding it 336 GB/s of bandwidth. It was one of the most popular mid-range gaming laptop GPUs of its generation.
It handles 1080p gaming at high settings across most titles, with ray tracing and DLSS both genuinely usable rather than just checkbox features, and can stretch to 1440p in less demanding games. NVIDIA allows laptop makers to configure its power limit up to 115W, and lower-wattage versions will trail the figures above by a meaningful margin.
DLSS 2 covers this card's feature set - AI Super Resolution, DLAA, and Ray Reconstruction for its ray-traced lighting, without the Frame Generation that only arrived with the RTX 40-series. Resizable BAR support is standard across Ampere, giving the CPU full access to this GPU's VRAM at once rather than in restrictive chunks, for a small but free performance bump.
This GPU name covers more than one real-world configuration
Laptop manufacturers configure this GPU's power limit (TGP) per model. The 115W figure above is a typical point within the chip's published TGP range - actual power limits, and real-world performance, can vary significantly between laptops using the same GPU name.
Upper mid-range
Smooth 1440p gaming and solid creative app performance.
3840 Cores
6 GB GDDR6 memory.
Boost up to 1425 MHz
Push performance beyond base clock.
GDDR6
Soldered (Mobile)
Configurable / Multiple Variants
Real-world specs can differ by laptop model - see the note above.
Our Verdict
The NVIDIA RTX 3060 is a upper mid-range dedicated GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 memory, suited to mainstream gaming and everyday graphics tasks.
