Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 could have slower RAM than the rest of the Ampere line-up

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RTX 3070 could have 8GB of GDDR6, compared to faster GDDR6X on the 3080 and 3090

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 GPU will use GDDR6 video RAM – rather than the faster GDDR6X which will purportedly be in the higher-end Ampere graphics cards – according to the latest from the rumor mill.

Videocardz claims that its sources have ‘confirmed’ that the RTX 3070 will come equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 to be precise.

This speculation has been floating around before, and indeed we heard it over the weekend, alongside a bunch of other leakage on Nvidia’s incoming next-gen graphics cards.

Naturally, this nugget is still far from ‘confirmed’ until Nvidia actually reveals the RTX 3070 and other GPUs – with the naming scheme seeming fairly certain now, at least given the amount of spillage and pics of RTX 3000 packaging – with the launch taking place later today.

Could Nvidia really switch out the RAM on the RTX 3070 for GDDR6? This is still a high-end graphics card, of course, so the move would be somewhat surprising in that respect, even if the 3070 isn’t in quite the same league as the RTX 3080 or 3090 (which will allegedly use GDDR6X).

Pricing issue?

We certainly need to exercise caution around this rumor, but still, maybe there are other issues at play here, potentially supply-related in terms of manufacturing – or even cost-related, if Nvidia wants to try to keep more of a lid on the RTX 3070’s price, if the superior models are going to carry weighty price tags as the rumor mill very much fears.

Whatever the case, there’s not long to go now until we’ll know the truth of the matter.

As we’ve already mentioned, there has been a good deal of RTX 3000-related spillage on Twitter, with Videocardz just having leaked a picture of another RTX 3090 retail box – in this case, the Inno3D iChill X4 – as well as various model names from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI (RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 variants).

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Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).