Nvidia delays RTX 3070 Ti 16GB until February, RTX 3080 12GB could have been canceled

While everything indicated that Nvidia would announce its new RTX 3070 Ti 16GB and RTX 3080 12GB this December 17 and that they would hit the market on January 11, it seems that Nvidia’s plans have changed. As reported by Igor’s Lab, the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB was delayed until February, after the Chinese New Year, while the RTX 3080 12GB was postponed indefinitely.

According to the manufacturers, only the presentation of the new top-of-the-line model for consumers GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, which is planned for CES, remains on the agenda, the rest have been paused at least for now.

Apparently, Nvidia would be waiting to see if Intel makes any announcement regarding its Arc Alchemist desktop GPUs during its CES 2022 presentation on January 4 to finish defining the specifications of the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB, to ensure that this model is more attractive than Intel’s top-of-the-line model and take advantage of the fact that it will arrive before its launch to maximize your sales. The idea is to define the final specifications that same week and aim for the first units to hit the market in February, although nothing is 100% confirmed yet.

Regarding the RTX 3080 12GB, apparently Nvidia did not provide new information to partners in recent weeks and stopped mentioning it in its latest updates, so everything indicates that this model was indefinitely postponed, or even canceled. As Igor mentions, this could be because with the high sales of the RTX 3080 10GB it does not make sense to add additional segmentation, and it is best to dedicate all the manufacturing resources to the RTX 3080 10GB to maximize your stock instead of separating resources in two different models.

This delay is a bit strange since apparently everything was ready for the announcement this week. Not only did we get rumors from most trusted leakers, but Gigabyte had also registered these two models with the EEC, confirming that they were actually planned by Nvidia and not just a rumor. It will be interesting to see if Nvidia ends up releasing these models, and when it does, since if they are too late they could make no sense with the RTX 4000 lineup on the way.

What do you think about this lag on the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB and RTX 3080 12GB? Were you expecting any of these new models?