An Upgraded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 With These Specs Is Allegedly Coming This Week
Looking back at CES week, a whole bunch of companies came ready with wide-ranging product announcements and concepts, including all the big players—AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA among them. But it also appears as though they all left some products unannounced. Like Intel's Core i5-12490F (probably limited to China) and, if the latest unofficial chatter is to be believed, a beefed up NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080.
Yes, a burlier version of the GeForce RTX 3080 already exists and it is called the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. However, rumor has it NVIDIA is planning to upgrade the regular (read: non-Ti) variant with a few key upgrades, including more GDDR6X memory that would put it on par (memory-wise) with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
Before we get to the rumor, let's recap the core specifications of the existing GeForce RTX 3080. It has 8,704 CUDA cores, a 1,710MHz boost clock, and 10GB of GDDR6X memory tied to a 320-bit bus for 760GB/s of memory bandwidth. The card also features 68 second-generation RT cores to power through ray-traced visuals,and 272 Tensor cores.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, meanwhile, boasts 10,240 CUDA cores, a 1,665MHz boost clock, and 12GB of GDDR6X memory linked to a 384-bit bus for 912GB/s of memory bandwidth. And for ray-traced gaming and DLSS, it's armed with 80 RT cores and 320 Tensor cores.
Upgraded GeForce RTX 3080 Rumored Specs
Those frames of reference out of the way, let's get to the latest rumor. The folks at WCCFTech say they've been told by their sources that NVIDIA originally intended to announce an upgraded GeForce RTX 3080 during its CES event, but decided against it at the last minute. Instead, it's said the card will be announced on January 11.
It's rumored the upgraded card will have 8,960 CUDA cores, which amounts to a slightly greater than 2.9 percent gain over the existing variant. Apparently the new version will also have 70 RT cores and 280 Tensor cores, so it's getting a slightly more powerful foundation for gaming if the rumor is to be believed.
What could be the most meaningful upgrade, however, is a jump to 12GB of GDDR6X memory tied to a 384-bit bus, for the same capacity and 912GB/s of memory bandwidth as the Ti model. The card is further said to have a 350W TDP.
These upgrades could mean a higher price than the current GeForce RTX 3080, but it's mostly academic anyway—as much as we'd like the GPU shortage to be over, the reality is this is likely to be another SKU that will be hard to find in stock (assuming the rumored part comes to fruition).
