There have been many rumours about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti recently, which would fill a performance and $800 price gap between the 3080 and 3090 – and if a couple of new leaks are anything to go by, this new graphics card may be coming to consumers next year.
HP’s OEM Nvidia GPU driver update support list seems to have listed some unconfirmed Ampere cards such as an RTX 3080 Ti, an RTX 3070 Ti, a non-Ti RTX 3060, and an RTX 3050, which if released would likely become the cheapest GPU in the Ampere lineup. There’s also another leak coming from graphics card manufacturer Manli, which registered a number of GPUs with the Eurasian Economic Commission, confirming many of the same cards mentioned in the HP leak, however, the RTX 3050 isn’t mentioned.
As they are rumours though, you’ll want to take all of this with a pinch of salt until Nvidia confirms the existence of any new Ampere cards – just because products are registered to these databases doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll see the light of day. And with stock shortages, we’ve seen manufacturers making u-turns on some of their decisions recently.
If the RTX 3080 Ti is confirmed, we’d expect Nvidia to try and at least match the hefty 16GB of VRAM in AMD’s latest RX 6000 series cards, as opposed to the current RTX 3080s 10GB. With a retail price of $699 for the current 3080 and $1,499 for the 3090, a 3080 Ti could be priced very similar to competitor AMD’s $999 flagship, the RX 6900 XT.
If the rumours of an RTX 3050 turn out to be true, too, this would become Nvidia’s entry-level GPU in its RTX 30 series, costing even less than the current cheapest $399 card, the RTX 3060 Ti. And, depending on its price point, it could become one of the best graphics cards for a great PC build on a tight budget, while still letting you benefit from Nvidia’s new Ray Tracing and DLSS technology.