[Hardware] Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 Refresh May Launch This Winter

[Agent47]

 

 

According to @hongxing2020 on Twitter, a refresh of the GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 could be on the horizon. These compete with the best graphics cards, and outfitting them with higher memory capacities will make them more attractive.

The most significant upgrades go to the RTX 2060 and RTX 3070 Ti. Hongxing believes the 2060 refresh will pack 12GB of memory, and the RTX 3070 Ti will feature 16GB, doubling the amount of memory for both cards. The RTX 3080, on the other hand, will only feature a small bump in VRAM capacity, up to 12GB. This will upgrade the RTX 3080 to the same memory capacity as its bigger brother, the RTX 3080 Ti.

The leaker believes the RTX 2060 refresh will launch on December 7th, with the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 following suit a bit later on January 11th. Please keep in mind these are rumors, so take these results with a grain of salt as always!

Perhaps the most interesting card of the bunch is the RTX 2060. This card, in particular, has been rumored to feature a 12GB memory upgrade for nearly a year now (according to Videocardz). It seems strange that Nvidia would upgrade a card from 2019, but given the current graphics card shortage we're experiencing, upgrading an RTX 2060 to 12GB of VRAM might not be such a bad idea.

RTX features like ray tracing and DLSS, along with ultra-high-quality textures, are starting to push 8GB memory configurations, never mind the 6GB RTX 2060. We suspect Nvidia is upgrading the memory to compensate for the more graphically demanding games we're seeing in 2021, like Far Cry 6. This could also be why Nvidia is targeting the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 for a memory upgrade, with their somewhat small 8GB and 10GB frame buffers.

However, a more compelling reason to refresh these cards might be competition against AMD's high capacity Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, which feature significantly more memory than their Nvidia counterparts. Most of Nvidia's Ampere products have been a step behind AMD's RDNA2 cards in memory capacity, making Nvidia's cards appear worse on the spec sheet. The refresh would alleviate this "problem."

The RTX 3080 does seem like an odd choice, though. The RTX 3080 Ti already ships with 12GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit memory interface, while the stock RTX 3080 has 10GB GDDR6X on a 320-bit interface. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have both models using the same memory speed, but shifting the RTX 3080 to 12GB of 16Gbps GDDR6 would yield nearly the same bandwidth (768 GBps vs. 760 GBps) while increasing capacity, and GDDR6 might be in better supply. Or these could all be fake rumors.

If Nvidia can replace all three SKUs with these new refreshed models and offer them at the same prices as the current models (not counting scalpers), these cards might be a nice little upgrade for the relatively few customers who will acquire these graphics cards in the face of the ongoing graphics card shortage. Unfortunately, there's no reason the newcomers would end up priced any better than the existing models, and adding more VRAM would likely just increase the prices.