Facepalm: A "new" Nvidia graphics card has hit US and European retail stores. But it's not the RTX 5000 Super series, unfortunately: it's the five-year-old RTX 3060, and it carries the same price it did in 2021. The Ampere-era GPU has been slowly making its return since the start of 2026, a response to the memory crisis that has turned the industry into a nightmarish hellscape.
Newegg is now listing the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G OC for $329.99 – its original launch price. VideoCardz writes that the listing was created on July 2 and published on July 5.
Claims that Nvidia might bring back the hugely popular RTX 3060 12GB first appeared in January. The card was discontinued in 2024, and all remaining warehouse stock is believed to have been exhausted by December 2025.
Since then, RAMageddon has caused major disruption across the graphics card market, particularly for models using GDDR7 memory, which include almost the entire RTX 5000 series.
In April, well-known leaker MEGAsizeGPU claimed Nvidia would relaunch the RTX 3060 in June. A few weeks later, a post on Chinese forum Board Channels suggested the return could instead happen sometime in July.
Last month, it was reported that Chinese manufacturer Colorful had sent its Battle Axe RTX 3060 Duo 12GB V2 to some stores in China. The initial allocation of cards was said to be very small – only a few dozen units per region – but Colorful was apparently going to start regular weekly restocks to ensure a stable supply.
Pricing the RTX 3060 at the same $329 MSRP it had five years ago is a sad illustration of just how bad the industry is right now. The cheapest RTX 5060 8GB cards are only around $20 to $30 more expensive while offering around 30% better performance over the older GPU, despite having less VRAM (8GB of GDDR7 vs 12GB of GDDR6).
Nvidia and its board partners will likely hope that the extra VRAM is a selling point, especially at a time when 8GB cards are increasingly criticized for struggling in newer games at higher resolutions. But the RTX 3060 is still an old mid-range card built on an older architecture, lacking the newer efficiency, media engine, and DLSS 4 features found in the RTX 5000 series.