Unreleased RTX 3050 Ti graphics card spotted in the wild, GA106 GPU with 6GB VRAM

Six years after the heyday of the Ampere GPU lineup, a desktop GeForce RTX 3050 Ti has shown up online, and it is a card NVIDIA never actually released. Leaked by X/Twitter user @GOKForFree, the mysterious sample confirms that a desktop version did exist during the Ampere era, it just never made it to retail shelves.

The card is reportedly an engineering sample, and it carries the GA106-200-A1 die, the same silicon used in the RTX 3060, but with 4 of its streaming multiprocessors disabled. That leaves 3,328 CUDA cores active, along with 104 TMUs and 48 ROPs, on a 192-bit memory bus. The specimen is labeled by an unfamiliar brand, "Robiny," with stickers identifying its specs. It runs a dual-fan, dual-slot design with a single 8-pin connector.

The unreleased card also shows up in GPU-Z, but the software labels it simply as "NVIDIA Graphics Device." Screenshots show a 1,410 MHz base clock and a 1,665 MHz boost clock, with GDDR6 memory running at 1,750 MHz for 336 GB/s of bandwidth. The power limits sit at 120W default, with a 100W minimum. The sample was apparently tested on old Ampere-era drivers from mid-2022, which tells you roughly how long this prototype has been sitting around.

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Thankfully, GOKForFree also ran some benchmarks to paint the full picture. Performance-wise, a 3DMark Time Spy graphics score of 7,787 puts it above typical RTX 3050 desktop results and close to RTX 3060 8GB territory. That tracks given the core count advantage. The RTX 3050 Ti has 30% more CUDA cores than the standard RTX 3050 and a wider memory bus, which gives it a comfortable performance cushion over the card that did ship.

The bigger talking point is the memory. Rather than 8GB, this card ships with just 6GB of GDDR6, which would have put it in an awkward spot. It would have been noticeably faster than the RTX 3050, but the reduced VRAM would have aged poorly in modern titles. That memory configuration may well be the reason NVIDIA shelved it. Shipping something faster than the RTX 3050 but with less VRAM than what consumers already had access to would have been a tough sell and an easy target for criticism.

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NVIDIA had been discussing PG190 and GA106-based RTX 3050 Ti configurations as far back as 2020. Instead, the company released the RTX 3050 Ti exclusively for laptops, while desktop users got multiple RTX 3050 variants across different memory and die configurations. In 2026, the RTX 3050 Ti is little more than a curious piece of Ampere history.