San Francisco, Feb 14 (IANS): US-based tech major Nvidia is set to release its most affordable GPU in the RTX 3000 series available at retailers beginning on February 25.

Designed to succeed the ageing GeForce GTX 1060 Pascal cards, the $329 mid-tier GPU RTX 3060 features 12GB of GDDR6 memory, reports The Verge.

The base 3060 is a spiritual successor to cards like the GTX 1060 and RTX 2060 and brings features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS to a sub-$350 Nvidia card for the first time.

Like the other products featured in the RTX 3000 series, the RTX 3060 will also support DLSS and Nvidia's suite of RTX applications.

In January, Nvidia said it anticipates supply for its GPUs to both consumers and partners "will likely remain lean through Q1," which doesn't end until late April.

To alleviate the short supply and sky-high prices, Nvidia confirmed that it plans to bring back its older RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards.

Unlike the RTX 3060 Ti and other higher-end boards, there won't be an official Founders Edition.

It's the slowest of the RTX 30 family to date with 'just' 3,584 CUDA cores, a 192-bit memory interface and a 1.32GHz base clock, Engadget reported. However, it also has the most memory of any mainstream Nvidia GPU, with 12GB RAM, it added.