Leaked specs of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and 3070

The RTX 3080’s 20GB VRAM is certainly inspiring.

Some details about the specs of Nvidia’s next generation Ampere graphics cards, the Nvidia RTX 3080 and RTX 3070, have circulated online, pointing to some serious video memory configurations.

Information about the supposedly upcoming video cards was presented Videocardzalthough the tech site – the source of a lot of GPU-related leaks – admits that the rumor has little credibility, which should be borne in mind.

However, the details have been posted by several sources, namely MyDrivers and KittyCorgi (the latter is a newly created Twitter account, which undoubtedly raises the first doubts – MyDrivers is also not a particularly reliable source).

As you can see, the tweet provides not only some details on the specs, but also alleged diagrams of the upcoming GPUs – although they could of course be faked.

In any case, the stated specifications refer to the allegedly upcoming Nvidia GA103 and GA104 video cards under the Ampere architecture.

The theory is that the GA104 will form the basis of the RTX 3070 (or whatever the video card in the Ampere series will eventually be called), and the GA103 will be the heart of the RTX 3080. There will also be a GA102 for the 3080 Ti and Titan.

If the leaks are correct, we’re looking at the RTX 3080, which will get 3,840 CUDA cores (versus 2,944 cores on the RTX 2080), along with a 320-bit memory bus and probably 10GB of video memory.

As you can see, the possibility of 20 GB of video memory is mentioned, but this figure seems too good to be true. Shoving that much video memory into a consumer graphics card (and not even screwing on a Ti) at this stage of the market development is an extremely steep stretch, especially considering that there are currently rumors of problems with insufficient video memory for GPUs (namely, problems with the delivery of GDDR6).

It is further claimed that the RTX 3070 will receive 3072 CUDA cores with a 256-bit memory bus and 8 GB of video memory (again, with the possibility of doubling this figure to 16 GB of video memory, which again raises doubts).

So given the quality of the sources and some of the specs announced – the likely memory size is particularly odd – it’s easy to see how precarious the leak is getting.

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What we can say with confidence is that Nvidia’s next-generation video cards are leaking more and more, and this in itself indicates that we are close to the first video card announcement.

Videocardz notes that Nvidia may share more details and a fresh roadmap for graphics cards at the GTC conference in March. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this, several early leaks promised to showcase Ampere GPUs on GTC.

Indeed, Videocardz points to the likely launch of new graphics cards in the second quarter of 2020, and previous leaks have discussed the likelihood of graphics cards coming out in the first half of 2020 – possibly with a Computex launch in June. However, these can be optimistic forecasts, at least very soon we expect new information on Ampere video cards.

From what we’ve heard so far, the purported 7nm graphics chips could be on 50% of modern Turing graphics cards, although this boost can only concern ray tracing – increasing tracing performance will obviously be Ampere’s main focus (not surprising).

Another tweet from KittyCorgi claims that the Ampere architecture will be geared towards ray-traced gaming, with a new “RT Core Advanced” design (but that doesn’t really tell us anything new that we haven’t heard before).

Here are the best graphics cards of 2020.