We heard just a few days ago that Nvidia may be preparing for the launch of new high-end and budget cards in its RTX 30 series, thanks to an HP OEM driver listing. Now we’ve got some more rumours , courtesy of Igor’s Lab, from unnamed sources – but their predictions have been reliable in the past.
According to the report, Nvidia’s yet-to-be-confirmed GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which we expect will have a pretty similar price to AMD’s flagship $999 RX 6900 XT card, is allegedly slated for a late February 2021 release, and it’s widely thought this will come with 20GB of GDDR6X VRAM – besting AMD’s 16GB of VRAM in its 6800 and 6900 cards. So, although it didn’t meet a previously rumoured December release, seems like Nvidia’s 20GB card may not be cancelled after all.
The report also states that the possibly upcoming RTX 3050 Ti – which has the potential to be one of the best graphics cards for a budget build – will instead be named the RTX 3060 6GB. There will also be a 12GB variant of this card, too, according to the leak, which is more VRAM than the 10GB RTX 3060 Ti. Igor’s Lab states that the release date for these two cards could be late January next year.
As with all rumours, you’ll want to take this with a pinch of salt, especially given that significant stock issues both Nvidia and AMD are facing have made the companies make some unprecedented moves – such as AMD extending production of its RX 6000 reference cards, and previous RTX SKUs have been scrapped. So who knows what Nvidia’s plan could be. Also, we’ve had no official announcement from Nvidia itself on any of these cards yet.
The rumour that the RTX 3050 Ti could be named the RTX 3060 6GB hasn’t been heard of before – but seeing as the previous RTX 20 series didn’t go lower than the RTX 2060, it would make sense for Nvidia to maintain this naming strategy.