As anticipated in the past few hours, NVIDIA announced unannounced the expansion of the 80 line of GeForce RTX 3000 video cards with the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB. The newcomer is not a simple GeForce RTX 3080 with 2 GB of more memory, but it comes with an increased 384-bit bus and a greater number of active units than the RTX 3080.
The GA102 GPU on board this card delivers 8960 CUDA core, 70 RT core e 280 Tensor core, compared to 8704, 68 and 272 active units of the RTX 3080. The new solution therefore fits under the RTX 3080 Ti which in turn has 10240 CUDA cores, 80 RT cores and 320 Tensor cores. As for clock rates, the GPU is set to 1260 / 1710 MHz as far as base and boost clock are concerned, while GDDR6X memory continues to be at 19 Gbps for a bandwidth of 912 GB/s like the RTX 3080 Ti.
| RTX 3080 Ti | RTX 3080 12 GB | RTX 3080 10 GB | |
| GPU | GA102 | GA102 | GA102 |
| SM | 80 | 70 | 68 |
| CUDA core | 10240 | 8960 | 8704 |
| RT core | 80 | 70 | 68 |
| Tensor core | 320 | 280 | 272 |
| Base clock | 1365 MHz | 1260 MHz | 1440 MHz |
| Boost clock | 1665 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1710 MHz |
| Memory | 12 GB | 12 GB | 10 GB |
| Bus | 384 bit | 384 bit | 320 bit |
| Memory speed | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 19 Gbps |
| Bandwidth | 912 GB/s | 912 GB/s | 760 GB/s |
| TDP | 350W | 350W | 320W |
| MSRP | 1199$ | ??? | 699$ |
By virtue of the changes, the 12 GB RTX 3080 sees the TDP rise to 350W compared to the 320W of the RTX 3080, reaching the same level as the RTX 3080 Ti. As for the list price (MSRP), NVIDIA has not stated it at the moment, but remember that the RTX 3080 is set at $ 699 and the RTX 3080 Ti at $ 1199, even if those lists have practically never been seen. Unfortunately, whatever the price of the variant with 12 GB will be, it will be neglected exactly like that of all the video cards introduced by NVIDIA and AMD in the last year and a half. Assuming a real price, we will probably see it at around 1600-1700 euros.
Asked about the future of the 10GB version and the need to introduce this model, NVIDIA has simply stated that the first will remain on sale and the reason for introducing 12GB is simply offer customers one more option. A somewhat vague answer, but in fact there is no valid reason other than to use as many GA102 chips as possible (unsuitable to end up on existing models) and rebalance the offer against the trio of AMD cards with 16 GB of high-end memory and perhaps future Intel Arc proposals.
There is no Founders Edition of this GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB, so much so that in the past few hours we have received a MSI RTX 3080 12 GB SUPRIM X that we will test in the coming days to verify the performance of the new NVIDIA proposal both compared to other similar models and to AMD’s competitors.