NVIDIA Pushes RTX 3070 Ti 16GB and RTX 3080 12GB Launches

NVIDIA has reportedly pushed midlife refreshes to its GeForce RTX 30-series “Ampere” graphics card family to beyond January, according to a report by Igor’s Lab. The company was supposed to launch as many as three high-end graphics card SKUs in early-Q1, which include a 16 GB variant of the RTX 3070 Ti, which maxes out the GA104 silicon, a refreshed RTX 3080 12 GB variant, which keeps the CUDA core count of the original RTX 3080, but maxes out the 384-bit memory bus width of the GA102; and the RTX 3090 Ti, which maxes out both memory and CUDA cores on the GA102.

It’s being reported that while the RTX 3090 Ti launch is on schedule, with announcements slated for NVIDIA’s 2022 International CES presentation; the RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB and RTX 3080 12 GB could be launched only after the Chinese New Year (at least mid-February). The three SKUs, we predict, are designed to calibrate NVIDIA’s lineup against a possible refresh of AMD’s RDNA2 graphics architecture on the TSMC N6 (6 nm) node, which could allow the company to dial up engine clocks across the board, along with faster 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, to better compete against the RTX 30-series. AMD is expected to announce these 6 nm GPUs in its CES presentation.