NVIDIA Might Add More VRAM To RTX 3070 Ti, 3080 And 2060 For Holiday Launch
One rumor that continues to persist is that NVIDIA will be adding more onboard memory to some of its existing graphics cards, both from within this generation (Ampere) and at least one model from its last generation (Turing) stack. The upgraded cards will ostensibly begin to land on retail shelves as soon as December, in time for Christmas.
In all reality, even if the bolstered GeForce RTX cards manifest as claimed, they will undoubtedly sell out immediately and find their way to eBay at inflated prices. Unfortunately, that's just the way it has been going in the midst of a silicon shortage and new, high-demand product launches. In any event, here is what we're looking at...
This leaker (@hongxing2020) has a limited history on Twitter. Nevertheless, they have been holding firm that NVIDIA is planning a trio of upgraded cards for 2022, with their latest tweet providing a somewhat updated time frame.
If the information is accurate, NVIDIA will announce a GeForce RTX 2060 model with twice as much GDDR6 memory (12GB versus 6GB) on December 7, with the card hitting retail on the same day. Then on December 17, NVIDIA is purportedly set to announce a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB of GDDR6X memory and a GeForce RTX 3080 with 12GB of GDDR6X memory, followed by retail releases on January 11, 2022.
It's not mentioned if any other specifications would change, like the number of CUDA cores or memory bus width. That said, here's how the lineup would like, within the Ampere range...
- GeForce RTX 3090: 10,496 CUDA cores, 24GB GDDR6X, 384-bit bus
- GeForce RTX 3080 Ti: 10,240 CUDA cores, 12GB GDDR6X, 384-bit bus
- Leaked GeForce RTX 3080: ??? CUDA cores, 12GB GDDR6X, ??? bus
- GeForce RTX 3080: 8,704 CUDA cores, 10GB GDDR6X, 320-bit bus
- Leaked GeForce RTX 3070 Ti: ??? CUDA cores, 16GB GDDR6X, ??? bus
- GeForce RTX 3070 Ti: 6,144 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6X, 256-bit bus
- GeForce RTX 3070: 5,888 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6, 256-bit bus
- GeForce RTX 3060 Ti: 4,864 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6, 256-bit bus
- GeForce RTX 3060: 3,584 CUDA cores, 12GB GDDR6, 192-bit bus
These additions, if they come to pass, could be a tad confusing for the casual shopper. It depends on how NVIDIA choose to handle things—will the existing GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 remain in the lineup as separate cards, or be replaced and phased out of production? We don't know. Of course, availability being what it is these days, we supposed it doesn't really matter all that much.
It will be interesting to see if these upgraded cards come to pass, and if so, at what MSRPs.
