It's challenging to get excited about graphics cards nowadays because they're so hard to find. However, NVIDIA found a way, as the company announced the RTX 3050 for $249 with full support for ray tracing and DLSS.
The graphics card supports NVIDIA Ampere architecture, which was previously reserved for much more expensive cards. That means you can play ray traced games on an affordable GPU from the 50 series at over 60 FPS for $249. That's a substantial discount over the current cheapest ray tracing card, which is the RTX 3060 that costs $80 more.
NVIDIA's new RTX 3050 features a solid 8GB of GDDR6 memory, which will help it run most games. Obviously, you're not going to be playing games in 4K with 144Hz refresh rates, but for the price, you'll have a hard time finding a card that can push these kinds of graphics for the price.
The card is scheduled to go on sale on January 27, 2022. However, the company isn't offering a Founder's Edition, which means you'll have to go through its partners to find one. As has been the case for some time, we're in the middle of a chip shortage, and we expect this one to be no different. Even though NVIDIA lists the price as $249, the chances of finding one at that price are slim, but you can certainly give it a shot when they go on sale.