NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Launching In February, RTX 3060 In January 2021

Igor over at Igor's Lab has just leaked the date for NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. This is the most anxiously anticipated card of NVIDIA's RTX 3000 lineup considering it has the full 20 GB vRAM buffer (unlike the 10GB buffer on the 3080) and is expected to be the "true" flagship considering the 3090 is basically a replacement for the Titan. While Igor has been rock solid in the past, please keep in mind that NVIDIA's launch schedules are vulnerable to Jensen changing his mind and other supply and demand factors - so take launch dates with a grain of salt.

Igor: RTX 3060 will come in 6GB and 12GB flavors.

According to Igor, the RTX 3080 Ti will be landing in February of 2021 while the RTX 3060 is going to be landing early in January 2021. This makes sense because the RTX 3060 is slated to be the budget king for NVIDIA's lineup and should be the one that users will want to buy in large volumes. That said, we are unsure of the state of NVIDIA's supply lines because as of a few weeks ago, there was no visibility as to when the company will be able to catch up to demand.

Even more, interestingly, Igor mentions that the RTX 3060 will come in a 6GB and 12GB flavor. If this is true then it would seriously depreciate the value of a 10GB RTX 3080. I complained about the 10GB buffer at the very start - as it is definitely not enough for a 2020 lineup of games that are based on asset streaming. Who knows, NVIDIA might decide to give the RTX 3080 the 20GB treatment as well once they have enough spare GDDR6 memory in stock.

Recap: The RTX 3080 Ti 20GB

The NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti  was originally supposed to be based on the PG132 SKU20 (although NVIDIA decided to rename it) and has been in the pipeline for quite some time. While the exact CUDA core count is not yet confirmed, it will have twice the amount of memory when compared to the vanilla RTX 3080. To be clear, even the nomenclature is not confirmed as the SUPER suffix could appear anywhere in the name should Jensen deem it so.
We highly recommend users (that want to buy an NVIDIA card) to go for the RTX 3090 (if they can afford it) or wait for the RTX 3080 Ti/SUPER 20 GB.

With this amount of shading power, you will want to have a complimentary memory buffer. According to Videocardz, the card will be landing in January 2021. Considering the fact that killer apps like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 already chomp away all the vRAM the 2080 Ti had to offer, 10 GB is going to feel tiny after a year or two. Next-gen consoles are already driving games with asset-streaming of large worlds, so vRAM is going to start becoming a lot more crucial than before. With AMD rocking a flagship card with 16GB of vRAM, NVIDIA had to reply with their own high vRAM card.

According to Kopite, the RTX 3080 Ti will be based on the GA102 and will have specifications between an RTX 3080 and 3090. The exact chip nomenclature is GA102-250-A1 and will feature a 384 bits bus with GDDR6X memory. The bus-size means NVIDIA will either be using a 12 GB buffer or a 24 GB one. Considering Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is already bottlenecked by the 11 GB ram on the RTX 2080 Ti, it would be disappointing to see NVIDIA ship another powerful GPU with a small memory buffer. With RTX IO and asset streaming (Unreal Engine demo for next-generation consoles) becoming a thing in the next year or so, every bit of buffer will help in this paradigm shift.

Jesus. A new spec of GA102, between 3080 and 3090.

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) October 27, 2020

It is also unclear at this point how the revelation of this new GPU fits into the rumors about NVIDIA planning a move back to TSMC. It does however lend credence to the belief that the RTX 3000 series, at least for now, is staying on the Samsung 8nm process. The company initially faced less than ideal yields and supply constraints at launch but those are expected to significantly improve as we enter into the new year.

GA102-250-A1, 9984FP32, 384bits GD6X

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) October 27, 2020

This is going to be an insanely powerful card with 34 TFLOPs of power. That said, the current API, driver, and application infrastructure cannot fully take advantage of all this raw power. This is the actual reason why NVIDIA's insanely powerful cards don't scale linearly with TLFOPs. The company essentially made cards that are ahead of their time when compared to the surrounding software ecosystem.

The hard evidence for this lies in the fact that the RTX 3000 series has been experiencing non-linear positive scaling when going down the stack. An RTX 3070 which has slightly more cores than the RTX 2080 Ti beats the former flagship - putting to rest any rumors or allegations about the CUDA cores in the Ampere series not being as strong as the Turing series or misleading blames at architecture design with lacking INT performance.

AMD's big Navi series drops later today and it remains to be seen how the GPU market shapes up as we enter into the holiday season. NVIDIA's pricing is great but it needs to work with developers to fix the API and driver stacks to properly take advantage of the raw performance offered by the Ampere series (fine wine of the highest order) and in the meantime, AMD is going to churn out budget-friendly performance cards with what appears to be ample supply. They have also taken a lot of steps to make sure that the bot-scalping that happened with NVIDIA does not happen at their Radeon RX 6000 series launch.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series 'Ampere' Graphics Card Specifications: