Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 (or RTX 3080 Ti, as it’s also been referred to) will use much faster GDDR6X memory, and possibly plenty of it, going by the latest from the rumor mill, which has also spilled further details on the consumer flagship for Ampere graphics cards.
As spotted by Videocardz, the juiciest rumor here comes directly from memory manufacturer Micron, which published details on its website (that have since been taken down) seemingly confirming both the RTX 3090 name (more on that later), and the fact that Nvidia is using Micron’s GDDR6X with this GPU.
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Micron noted that GDDR6X will deliver speeds of up to 21Gbps, and that the RTX 3090 could theoretically break the 1TB/s barrier for total bandwidth, which would indicate a 384-bit memory bus for the GPU – a figure that previous speculation has indeed mentioned.
In short, we can expect blazing fast performance from the video memory, and according to Micron, there will be 12GB of GDDR6X on board the RTX 3090.
Again, that’s a figure that the rumor mill has mentioned in the past, although more recent speculation has pointed to greater quantities of VRAM, namely 20GB.
Tons of RAM
Indeed, Videocardz also spotted further chatter on the GPU grapevine indicating that the RTX 3090 will be loaded up with 24GB of memory: not only is there an alleged picture of the graphics card showing 12 memory modules on the back (with presumably another 12 on the front), Rogame has also tweeted to indicate the card will run with a hefty 24GB.
[Nvidia Ampere] 🧐GA102 24GB / 3090> 1410MHz base clock > 1740MHz boost clockCompared to the Titan RTX these clocks are +60MHz/-30MHzTitan RTX is 1350MHz/1770MHz https://t.co/bYGbIsF4z6August 14, 2020
As you can see, Rogame (a prolific hardware leaker) also shared the purported clock speeds of the RTX 3090, with a base clock of 1410MHz and boost to 1740MHz (more conservative than some of the super-high clock speed rumors we’ve seen floating around this year).
Of course, take all this with the usual caveats and salt, because it’s just buzz from the rumor mill after all – although the fact that the info on GDDR6X is taken directly from Micron does, of course, count for a lot.
It’s still no guarantee that even though Micron uses the RTX 3090 name that this will be what the Nvidia Ampere flagship ends up being called (that could still be a placeholder name used at the time of writing the document). Or indeed that the other info provided isn’t outdated like the quantity of RAM being 12GB.
Regarding the name, it could well be the 3080 Ti as mentioned, or indeed perhaps Nvidia will choose something entirely different than going the 3000 series route. Who knows…
What we do know is if it does turn out that the quantity of memory is 24GB (or indeed 20GB) of this new faster GDDR6X RAM, that will of course have ramifications for the cost of the RTX 3090. In other words, it’s likely to be a serious wallet-worrier.
We will find out soon enough, as Nvidia has its big Ampere launch scheduled for September 1, which is just a couple of weeks away now.
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