Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics card may not see the light of day until February 2021, according to the latest from the GPU grapevine.
The previous word from the rumor mill was that the RTX 3080 Ti (packing 20GB of VRAM) would debut in January, and several recent leaks served to underline that a launch might be imminent – but apparently that’s not the case.
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The latest speculation as provided by VideoCardz’s sources is that the GPU will now be out in February, and that’s backed up by well-known hardware leaker Igor (of Igor’s Lab fame). Furthermore, it’ll probably be late in February.
Apparently Nvidia is less inclined to be rushing this RTX 3080 Ti card out the door, because the vanilla RTX 3080 – with its much lower loadout of 10GB of video memory – isn’t feeling the pressure that the company thought it would from AMD’s Big Navi launch.
And this makes sense looking at the overall perspective in terms of the stock shortages which are currently plaguing Ampere graphics cards. If Nvidia can avoid putting more strain on production, it surely will do, given that fulfilling the demand for existing RTX 3000 cards is something it can’t manage, and that’s a situation which we’ve heard won’t improve until potentially February 2021 (coincidentally).
RTX 3060 in two flavors?
All that said, if you think Nvidia won’t be doing anything in January now, think again, because the second part to this rumor is that the RTX 3060 will debut in two variants.
Again, both VideoCardz and Igor believe this to be the case, and that Nvidia will push out an RTX 3060 loaded with 12GB of VRAM, and one with 6GB – both with different CUDA core counts, apparently, further differentiating performance, and potentially being a source of confusion to boot.
The card with 12GB of memory could theoretically be out in mid-January, with the second flavor to follow later in the month – although the latter could also be delayed like the 3080 Ti.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether any of this will actually happen, but the theory is that the previously rumored 3050 Ti has effectively been repositioned as the RTX 3060 with less video RAM (remember that the 3050 Ti was supposedly using the same GPU as the 3060, the GA106, going by previous leaks).
At any rate, the overall weight of rumors indicates that we could well see something in the way of new desktop graphics cards from Nvidia in January, and also the revelation of RTX 3000 mobile GPUs.
