NVIDIA's RTX 3050 is the budget GPU that keeps on going, as new AD106 variant could be out soon

NVIDIA may be about to release a new spin on its GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, going by the latest from the GPU grapevine.

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This theoretical launch is the NVIDIA RTX 3050 A, and the hint that it's inbound is the fact that it has just been listed in GPU-Z, which has a new release out (version 2.67.0).

This isn't the first time we've heard about the RTX 3050 A, as rumors were circulating last year (when the GPU was spotted in the PCI ID repository). As Tom's Hardware, which picked up on this, observes, back at the time, NVIDIA confirmed the graphics card and said it was built with an AD106 chip rather than GA107.

Lovelace was substituted instead of Ampere here, perhaps due to the latter no longer being in production - or maybe to use up stocks of AD106 chips which failed to make the grade for other cards. (There's plenty of room to cut CUDA Cores with AD106 and still have enough for the RTX 3050's core count).

What we don't know yet is if this graphics card might be a mobile variant, or a desktop board - time will tell (hopefully, if anything comes of all this).

As well as the RTX 3050, the new GPU-Z release supports the NVIDIA RTX 5050 - both laptop and desktop - and TechPowerUp also announced that its monitoring utility now benefits from hardened security.

Away from NVIDIA, support has also been added for some pro-targeted GPUs, namely the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700, and from Intel, the Arc PRO B50 and B60.