Nvidia RTX 3090 Super GPU rumors just won’t die – but how likely is it?

Nvidia RTX 3090 being held close to camera
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia is readying to launch a trio of new models of graphics cards at the very start of 2022, with the beefiest offering being the RTX 3090 Super, fresh nuggets from the rumor mill suggest.

Of course, we’ve heard speculation on the subject of the RTX 3090 Super before, and this will purportedly be accompanied by a new flavor of RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB of VRAM, and a relaunched RTX 2060 with more video memory, doubling the RAM configuration up to 12GB (again, a possibility previously floated on the GPU grapevine).

According to the leaker @hongxing2020 (whose tweet was spotted by VideoCardz), the RTX 3090 Super – plus the others – will be arriving in January of next year.

No further details on the 3090 Super were imparted aside from the release date, and as well as the scant nature of this post, we must also bear in mind that this is an unproven hardware leaker with no real following.

That said, a renowned leaker, @harukaze5719, also just shared a rumor originating in Taiwan which claims that EVGA could be about to declare its RTX 3090 Kingpin end-of-life, to replace it with a 3090 Super Kingpin.

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Analysis: How realistic is an RTX 3090 Super, in truth?

While the source (@hongxing2020) requires huge doses of salt here, at least @harukaze5719 is a more reliable (relatively speaking) Twitter leaker who is also talking about the RTX 3090 Super. And, with more rumors starting to swirl out there about this possible supercharged flagship, it’s perhaps seeming a touch more likely that this GPU could happen.

Remember, there was previous gossip from @Greymon55 (another regular Twitter leaker) in late August, too, which claimed the 3090 Super will bristle with 10,752 CUDA cores and pull 400W in terms of power draw.

Ultimately, though, we’re not sure how much sense it makes for Nvidia to be pushing out an even more powerful version of its Ampere flagship. That said, we have acknowledged the argument in the past that with the 3080 Ti nipping at the performance heels of the RTX 3090, maybe the 3090 Super would help to differentiate Nvidia’s top-end offerings more clearly. We can’t rule that out, by any means.

A beefed-up RTX 3070 Ti with double the VRAM – currently it has 8GB, and 16GB would be a welcome move – is certainly possible, as is the RTX 2060 coming back with twice the video RAM as well. The latter has been mentioned before, as we observed above, and indeed in that past rumor the launch date was also pegged at January 2022. It’s not an unrealistic move for the 2060 to return to help mitigate Ampere stock woes; after all, the Turing workhorse remains a solid enough option for 1080p gaming.

Interestingly, this new rumor doesn’t mention any other Super variants, but if a beefier RTX 3070 Ti is coming, that could be in lieu of a Super refresh. It’s arguable whether we need a 3070 or 3080 Super further cluttering up Nvidia’s RTX 3000 GPU range anyway, given that the Ti variants of these cards already exist.

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).