NVIDIA RTX 3080 12 GB May Offer 8,960 CUDA Cores

The RTX 3080 12 GB is still a rumored card, despite the increasing amounts of evidence towards its eventual release. The card’s refreshed VRAM amount in particular seems to be an important part of NVIDIA’s competitiveness plan, not only against AMD’s RX 6000-series, which sport a psychological (and sometimes practical) advantage with their 16 GB VRAM capacities; but against Intel and its upcoming ARC Alchemist launch, which are expected to also offer 16 GB of VRAM at competitive shading performance levels.

But it seems that NVIDIA’s refresh of the RTX 3080 graphics card won’t be limited to a VRAM and bus width increase – CUDA core counts are now reported to have also increased by 2.9%, up to 8,960 from the RTX 3080 10 GB’s 8,704 CUDA cores. The card is naturally still expected to make use of the GA-102 chip. An expected increased memory bus width of 384-bits will also bring about an increase in memory bandwidth, at 912 GB/s, the same as the RTX 3080 Ti (it stands at 760 GB/s for the RTX 3080).

All of these changes do however conspire to bring about an increase in the card’s TDP as well – up to 350 W, the same as the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090. The RTX 3080 12 GB is now expected to be available through mid-late January 2022 – it seems that board partners have already received some number of the chips that are meant to go into the RTX 3080 12 GB cards of this world.