Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is to be the next GPU to launch in the Ampere range after the RTX 3070 debuts in mid-October.
That’s the latest Ampere rumor from Videocardz, which cites two separate sources claiming that this is the case – but take the usual sizeable scattering of salt with this one.
The theory is that Nvidia will unleash the 3060 Ti before the vanilla 3060, which is an unusual state of affairs. Normally, we’d expect the latter to come first, or both cards to debut at the same time. After all, it seems a bit odd to have a pepped-up version of a base card that doesn’t exist.
The 3060 Ti could come first because it uses the same GPU as the 3070 (GA104), albeit obviously a cut-down version (with 4,864 CUDA cores), and the different chip that the plain RTX 3060 will use (purportedly the GA106) isn’t yet ready for production.
Alternatively, Videocardz theorizes that Nvidia is anticipating AMD’s RX 6000 graphics cards will include a strong mid-range product, and that something beefier than the bog standard RTX 3060 is required to stand up against that anyway.
Certainly it appears that Nvidia is carefully considering what its rival will do given a further rumor that a beefier version of the RTX 3080 – one with twice the VRAM, at 20GB – is being held waiting in the wings to interfere with the launch of the flagship Big Navi GPU when it’s announced.
Launch timeframe
With the RTX 3070 coming out on October 15, the prospect is that the RTX 3060 Ti (or it could be the RTX 3060 Super, as a previous rumor suggested – the name isn’t confirmed) could come out in late October, a week or two afterwards. Although Videocardz says that sources aren’t certain of that, but that’s just where Nvidia has the launch pencilled in on its internal roadmaps right now.
As well as having 4,864 CUDA cores – which is 1,024 less than the RTX 3070 – the RTX 3060 Ti is expected to use 8GB of video RAM at 14Gbps, going by the current speculation. Don’t take that as read, obviously – or any of this rumor for that matter – but the good news is if the launch might be less than a month away, we’ll likely be hearing more concrete info on the graphics card very soon.
What consumers are doubtless hoping for more than anything is that Nvidia actually manages to produce larger quantities of initial stock for these Ampere graphics cards that are next in line for release.