Leaks and rumours have started to come through about the possible specification for the upcoming generation of Nvidia GPUs, currently codenamed Ampere. The first leak comes from a new Twitter account, @CorgiKitty and there’s no particular reason to think it’s a legitimate leak except that it is relatively consistent with another apparent leak from MyDrivers. This gives us two leaks, with little or no idea who from, but they say similar things, and they don’t seem too far outside the realms of possibility. So what do they say?
The two GPUs being described are Amperes with the working names of GA104 and GA103, which by context we’d have to assume are the Geforce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3080 respectively.
The specification for the RTX 3080 would be 3480 stream processors, 320-bit video memory and 10/20GB GDDR6 video memory. This would be a significant step up, especially in terms of the amount of memory. The jump in specification for the RTX 3070 would be to 3072 stream processors, 256-bit memory and 8/16GB GDDR6 RAM. The MyDrivers leak uses the term stream processors rather than CUDA Cores which is the term Nvidia usually uses, although this could possibly be a translation issue, or perhaps the leaker just doesn’t care what Nvidia wants to call its things.
The MyDrivers rumour also states that the new cards will be 7nm and there is a mention of the possibility that the cards might arrive in a standard version with a Super upgrade soon after, as the 20XX series GeForce cards did, but no claim to know if this will happen.
No doubt we’re going to find out more by the time GDC rolls around in March, either by Nvidia actually telling people things, or leaks, or people dragging up snippets of information off the Internet. The possibility that we could soon see a graphics card with 20GB of RAM under the hood makes interesting food for thought too. Could such hefty blocks of RAM being brought to the table be the start of a push towards 8K gaming?