The rumor mill churns ever onward with the latest reports focusing on NVIDIA. According to Videocardz.com, Team Green is set to launch three SKUs in September— RTX 3090 24GB, RTX 3080 10GB, and RTX 3070 8GB. Add-In Board partners are getting ready to show off their own takes on the RTX 3080, with double the VRAM to close the extremely wide gap. However, that model is even further back on the TBA queue than the rumors we’re already aware of.
NVIDIA’s Ampere GPU architecture is supposed to bring to consumers a handful of new features and supported technology. Among these include the 2nd Gen ray-tracing cores and 3rd Gen AI Tensor cores, PCIe 4.0 support, and HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.
While the lackluster memory configurations on the 3080 and 3070 surely are at least a little disappointing, data from the rumor sources mention a 7nm fabrication node. If this is true, it’s a welcome surprise — speculation leaned largely toward NVIDIA using Samsung 8nm nodes for Ampere, with one of the more credible leakers speaking quite adamantly against NVIDIA using anything else. But assuming these new sources can be trusted, then great.
TSMC’s 7nm nodes perform better and cooler, which is definitely a good thing when looking at the power draw across the board.
Still, dat gap between the 3090’s and 3080’s VRAM is disheartening. Plus, the 70 models being stuck with 8GB for the third generation in a row is—to put it frankly—ball-busting, especially considering it looks like it isn’t even using GDDR6X modules. If you were a GTX 1080 Ti owner waiting for good news in this generation after skipping out on the 20XX series, you’re likely going to be in for a rude awakening as anything less than the 3090 would be a VRAM downgrade. Such users should probably wait for the supposed 3080 20GB variants from the AIBs.
In fact, anyone hoping to upgrade would do well to wait anyway. Looking at spec sheets is one thing, but nothing is certain until benchmarks are made available.
On the other hand, VRAM is not the biggest factor that affects performance. After all, it is important to see how all of these numbers on paper come together in the real world. However, the wait won’t be too long now with the 3070 supposedly launching just around the corner. That is if we assume nothing has changed.
It also gives everyone a chance to hold out for Big Navi news. There are speculations that AMD will be announcing their next-generation graphics cards in the next couple of months, which hopefully will rock the boat and, at the very least, offer a viable alternative to NVIDIA’s offerings. Well, the last generation wasn’t so hot for Team Red, so there’s plenty of catching up to do on their end.
Of course, Team Red is still capable of surprising the entire world when it comes to their CPU division. However, it remains to be seen whether they can repeat this success with their GPUs.
While this news is based on rumors, the sources cited are credible. So, if you’re planning to upgrade to an NVIDIA card this generation, the information we know so far is as reliable as we’re going to get short of an official announcement—which should be coming within the next four days if the guesstimates are to be believed. If, however, you’ve already got a 20-series card, or better yet, a GTX 1080 Ti —still one of the best GPU values in history, right up there with the 8800GT — we highly recommend refraining from throwing your money at the screen just yet.
