If you're disappointed by the lack of gaming talk in Nvidia's CES keynote, fear not because the company might be, umm, bringing back the RTX 3060
Ah yes, the RTX 30-series. What a time that was. There were chip shortages back then, spurred in part by the crypto boom. If only we'd known just how good we had it even during that shortage, though, compared to the terrifying spectre of the memory shortage we have today. Well, as it turns out, that shortage might be so bad that Nvidia rolls back the clock and starts churning out RTX 3060 GPUs again.
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It's only a mere whisper of a rumour at this point, as it's based solely on X user and hardware leaker hongxing2020's post stating "RTX 3060 Q1 come back" (via Wccftech). Hongxing is a pretty well-regarded hardware leaker, though, so there's at least some air of credibility to this, though there's also a chance this could be referring just to the China market.
The other thing that gives it an air of credibility is the sheer shambles that is the PC hardware industry right now, thanks to the memory shortage—which, let's not forget, Nvidia is participating in as the world's top supplier of AI chips. With DRAM prices not looking like they'll be dropping any time soon, it might make sense for Nvidia to boot up production of an older-gen GPU to tide things over.
RTX 3060 GPUs use relatively slow GDDR6 memory, whereas RTX 50-series GPUs use GDDR7. So bringing back the RTX 3060 would ease the demand for that particular memory a bit. Plus, doing so would keep TSMC 4N, the process both consumer RTX 50-series chips and Blackwell AI server chips are made on, free for production of the latter, as the RTX 3060 was made on Samsung's 8 nm node.
There are actually two versions of the RTX 3060, one 8 GB and one 12 GB. If Nvidia decides to start churning out 12 GB versions, I'm sure there will be much rejoicing—especially by me, as I recently prophesied the coming of a cheap 12 GB GPU from AMD or Nvidia. But that might just be wishful thinking, as some real top-tier Reddit memes make clear.
On the one hand, more GPU options would be good news for consumers in the current market. On the other hand, the return of the RTX 3060 wouldn't exactly spell confidence in the GPU market over the medium-term.
The RTX 3060 ceased production over a year ago, and only recently did its supplies start running out. Raising it from the dead would worry me not just because it shows the market is in dire straits—we can already see that—but because it might show, in concrete action, that Nvidia is willing to sacrifice gaming GPU production for AI accelerator production.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but it wouldn't exactly be a surprise to see Nvidia take that line, would it? Just look at the complete lack of gaming talk in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's recent keynote address at CES. 2026 is looking like a rough time to be a PC gamer.