Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 – or whatever the next-gen Ampere flagship graphics card ends up being called – has witnessed more spillage around its spec details, including speculation that it will load up with 24GB of video RAM.
Building on the previous Ampere rumor from Kopite7kimi, which first floated the idea that there are going to be three flavors of top-end next-gen Nvidia cards, all based on the GA102 GPU, this fresh speculation comes from Igor’s Lab (a well-known source for hardware leaks).
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It contends that there could be an RTX 3090 (perhaps even a Super or Ti branded model) with 24GB of GDDR6X memory on-board, and a 384-bit memory bus – but it’ll purportedly demand 350W of power from your PSU.
Of course, that points to a seriously beefy GPU, and given that, we could be looking at a successor to the Turing (current-gen) RTX Titan (although that also comes with 24GB of VRAM – so it would mean no upgrade on the memory front).
Currently, the Titan is positioned as a high-end card aimed at professional usage and the likes of heavyweight 3D rendering tasks, so the alleged RTX 3090 could be a case of effectively repositioning a super-powerful GPU as a consumer-facing flagship – with perhaps an even beefier Titan sequel to follow in the future?
How this will pan out is just guesswork at this point, naturally, but the leaked specs seem to point more to a heavyweight GPU rather than something aimed at gamers, and we remain unconvinced that the rumored RTX 3090 name will actually come to pass.
Of course, bear in mind that all of this is still speculation, although the various pieces filtering through the grapevine are starting to fit together more with this latest rumor.
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Indeed, Igor’s Lab reckons that the recent leaked images we saw purporting to be the RTX 3080 with a radical new fan design are indeed the real deal. Igor’s sources say that Nvidia has launched an investigation to find out who spilled these pictures – one potential suspect is somebody at Foxconn – and apparently the graphics card maker may even be forced to redesign the cooler now, so its revelation still has some impact when it comes to launch time.
Another piece of news on the cooler is that rumor has it that the new shroud and cooler for the incoming Ampere Founders Edition costs no less than $150 (around £120, AU$210), and if that’s true, we are potentially looking at somewhat more expensive GPUs this time around, to cover that additional cost.
Under the RTX 3090, Igor’s sources say that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (or alternatively 3080 Super – again these names are just rumored) will sit with 11GB of GDDR6X memory and a 352-bit memory bus, with a 320W TDP. And then comes the vanilla RTX 3080 with a slightly lesser 10GB of GDDR6X video memory with a 320-bit memory bus, but the same power consumption.
So as we noted before, that’s three flavors using the beefy next-gen GA102 GPU – not to mention beefy amounts of power, which could of course explain the need for a dramatic cooler redesign to help keep the temperature of these graphics cards suitably under control.
We're still not sure the GPU will be called the RTX 3090, even though that's what a lot of the rumors are calling it. Nvidia hasn't released a x90 card since the GTX 690 way back in 2012, so we'd be surprised to see one now. Still, until we find out more about the official names for these GPUs, all we're left with is guesswork.
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Via Tom’s Hardware
