We reported a couple of weeks ago that Nvidia looks set to release an RTX 3080 Ti laptop graphics card, and thanks to a fresh Geekbench leak there's further weight to add to that speculation.
VideoCardz reports that an unspecified HP Omen laptop is equipped with an Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU alongside Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU. Some of these also listed 'Nvidia Graphics Device' for the driver name which doesn't give us much to work with, but given this is all unconfirmed information anyway, try not to take anything as gospel. Much like the mobile RTX 3080, the RTX 3080 Ti looks like it will ship with 16GB of VRAM.
Speculation about higher-end notebook GPUs from Nvidia has been flying around for quite some time now, although previous leaks suggested that an RTX 3080 Super was planned rather than the current Ti allocation. Naming conventions aside, the SKU for this model of the mobile GPU seemingly confirms that it will feature 58 Compute Units, each carrying 128 CUDA cores.
After some basic maths, we can assume that the RTX 3080 Ti mobile will have 7,424 CUDA cores over the 6,144 featured in the mobile RTX 3080, though 256 CUDAs appear to have been disabled for this variant. The Vulcan score is a fairly impressive 90,114 points, which actually sets it below the standard RTX 3080 laptop GPU average score of 91,130, but we expect this number will change after drivers have been finalized and everything has been fine-tuned.
If we have to hazard a guess, an announcement around CES 2022 looks likely, so take things with a pinch of salt for now and hopefully, we'll have confirmation on potential performance by January.
Analysis: What does this mean for RTX 4000?
Rumors for a new addition to the Ampere RTX 3000 series of mobile graphics cards have been circulating for months, with estimations that they could be unveiled early in 2022. Given the ongoing silicon shortage, it feels like an unusual time for Nvidia to be focusing its efforts on a new laptop GPU, especially when the current lineup feels fairly well balanced, but no doubt people will be itching to get their hands on a new, powerful gaming laptop once they appear in the wild.
We also know that Nvidia is currently working on its RTX 4000 series, codenamed 'Lovelace', but this new generation is currently expected to appear around the end of 2022, which would fit the timeline expectations set by previous releases.
To us, it would surely make more sense to focus efforts on creating a well-balanced lineup of RTX 4000 mobile GPUs rather than churn out another addition to the current family, but as we have no way of knowing for sure that Lovelace will land by this time next year, this could be in preparation for a delay on RTX 4000 gaming laptops.
