NVIDIA's RTX 3060 could be staying around as a budget option to tackle AMD's rival low-end GPUs

It looks like we'll be seeing the RTX 3060 graphics card rolling off the production lines for some time yet.

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NVIDIA is rumored not to be ditching the RTX 3060 anytime soon (Image Credit: NVIDIA)

NVIDIA plans to keep the RTX 3060 GPU in production for the foreseeable future, rather than it being shelved now that the RTX 4060 has been available for a while.

According to a report from Chinese tech site IT Home - sprinkle salt aplenty around with this, as ever with the rumor mill - NVIDIA wants to keep manufacturing this last-gen GPU, at least in the near-term, to compete with AMD's RX 6750 GRE.

This is in the Chinese market, of course, where the RTX 3060 still holds its price at around 2,000 yuan (80% of its asking price at launch), currently just a bit cheaper than the RX 6750 GRE, and it remains a popular buy for NVIDIA at this level.

Presumably we'll see the RTX 3060 continue to be available outside of China, as well, at least on the near horizon anyway.

It is, of course, a popular graphics card, and one which has long been high on the rankings of GPUs in the monthly hardware survey Valve compiles of Steam gamers and their rigs. Indeed, the RTX 3060 is top by quite some way in the October survey (and went up a good deal - a rise partially driven by the survey including more Chinese PCs, underlining its popularity in that country).

As Wccftech (which spotted the IT Home report) points out, it's expected that the RTX 3060 should get price cuts in China to bring it even lower - and differentiate it more from the 4060. (That Lovelace successor launched at 2,400 yuan, and while only a relatively modest uplift in performance, it does have additional benefits, notably being hugely faster for DLSS 3 games).

Maybe we can expect those price cuts to filter through in the US and elsewhere, because the lower-end of the GPU market is becoming an increasingly heated space - particularly as we've seen some truly tempting bargains from Intel with its Arc graphics cards of late.