2022 looks promising for gamers looking for a budget graphic card. Nvidia, AMD and Intel are reportedly getting ready to release what should be some of their cheapest GPUs for launch. Nvidia’s long forgotten RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti GPUs are reported to have a release prepared for the first half of 2022.

The RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti was first released back in May 2021 with many of them making their way into laptops, including the MSi Pule GL66. Both the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti are rumoured to arrived with the GA106 GPUs on desktop.

The RTX 3050 and RTX 3050Ti are said to come with 8GB of VRAM, as opposed to the lower 3GB available on the laptop models. Thats going to make a big difference in performance, specifically in the frame rates.

The chip shortage coupled with the crypto vampires have both stifled supply and increased demand, which in turn has caused a marked increase in gaming GPU prices. We just hope that the GPU manufacturers directive hasn’t changed in favour of miners and doesn’t degrade GPU progression.

The RTX 3060 12GB Graphic Card on paper is advertised as $329. If in stock anywhere we can almost guarantee the price to be much greater than that. That’s also the cheapest Graphic Card of the series. There is however potential of a silver lining in the form of bundles which we’ve discussed previously. Prebuilt gaming PCs will likely be prime candidates for these two cheaper Nvidia Graphic Cards, and the prices haven’t increased as much in this category.

It’s not like Nvidia is the only option, either. Two weeks ago it was news of AMD’s Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 that had us excited for some affordable options in PC gaming. No doubt these will also find their way into prebuilt PCs when they do arrive, and hopefully will be offered as discrete components, too.

Next year will also see the arrival of Intel in the discrete graphics card space, in earnest for gaming. The company will be releasing its Arc lineup of GPUs at some point in the new year, and the latest rumours from another reliable leaker, TUM_APISAK, tell tale of a budget GPU by the name of Intel Arc A380, which should feature 6GB of VRAM and offer around Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super performance.