author: Bart Woldanski
GeForce RTX 3080 20 GB and RTX 3070 16 GB Confirmed by Gigabyte
The launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 is behind us, but this is just the beginning of the flood of new Nvidia Ampere chipsets. Gigabyte has confirmed the existence of GeForce RTX 3080 20GB, GeForce RTX 3070 16GB and GeForce RTX 3060 8GB.
Yesterday we've seen the official release of first Ampere GPU - GeForce RTX 3080, for which users tempted by positive reviews will have to wait for huge amount of time due to availability problems. For those who fear that 10 and 8 GB of VRAM in GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 respectively may not be enough for future gaming, we have good news. Gigabyte's official website, the one where we can reclaim the code for Watch Dogs: Legion, has confirmedthe existence not only of these dual memory models, but also of the cheaper GeForce RTX 3060 with 8 GB VRAM. In total, five cards previously undisclosed by Nvidia were spotted:
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 (SUPER/Ti) AORUS Master 20 GB (GV-308SAORUS M-20GD)
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming OC 20 GB (GV-308GAMING OC-20GD)
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 (SUPER/Ti) AORUS Master 16 GB (GV-307SAORUS M-16GD)
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 (SUPER/Ti) Gaming OC 16 GB (GV-3070SGAMING OC-16GD)
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 (SUPER/Ti) Eagle OC 8 GB (GV-3060SEAGLE OC-8GD)
GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 have been rumored of for a long time, but this time it's almost official confirmation. The above list suggests that GeForce RTX 3080 may receive not only a 20GB version with GDDR6X memory, but also a more efficient variant with the annotation Ti or SUPER, to be released after the launch of competing AMD Radeon RX 6000 (official announcement will take place on October 28, this year). Of course, the increase in VRAM volume will be associated with price increase (possibly by $100-200), which may affect the uneconomic viability of GeForce RTX 3070 Ti/SUPER 16 GB with 6144 CUDA cores, which will significantly outperform GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB with 8704 CUDA cores. It's not the first time that GeForce RTX 3060 Ti/SUPER is mentioned, allegedly with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, a 256-bit bus and 448GB/sec bandwidth, the same as the more expensive GeForce RTX 3070. The difference will mainly be in the number of CUDA cores (4864 versus 5888).
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti would be on sale at the end of October, while GeForce RTX 3080 20 GB, RTX 3080 20 GB Ti/SUPER, and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti/SUPER 16 GB could make their debut around the launch of AMD's Big Navi graphics cards. Meanwhile, we look forward to the market debut and first benchmarks of the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 (September 24; reviews probably the day before) and GeForce RTX 3070 (October 15; reviews probably the day before), which were officially confirmed by Nvidia. At the end of the year, we'll be buried in new architecture-based GPUs, and we shouldn't complain about the choice in different price ranges - the big problem will be their poor availability in shops.