NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (SUPER) and RTX 3070 rumored to feature GA104 GPU

NVIDIA GeForce 30 Series Rumors

On Twitter, the speculation on the upcoming GeForce 30 series is not slowing down. In fact, we are seeing increased activity in the leak and rumor space regarding the new series. Some Twitter accounts have been sharing even more information in recent weeks, which could suggest that we are approaching the new series launch.

Rumors that were true

So far two leaks from Kopite7Kimi have turned out to be true. The Big Ampere (GA100) specifications have been correctly predicted (May 22nd, 2019) and the irregular-shaped board for the GeForce Ampere graphics card (Jan 20th, 2020) has been partially-confirmed thanks to a recent leak.  Kopite7Kimi has made many claims, some of which are very interesting and quite frankly, hard to believe. The PCB shape was one of such things, and despite how crazy it sounded, it partially turned out to be true (partially since the leak is not official information).

Memory speed: 18, 19, 20 or 21 Gbps?

The leaker also said that the memory clock speeds could reach up to 21 Gbps thanks to the newer GDDR6X memory standard. No company has yet announced the mass production of such chips, thus this rumor is yet to be confirmed. We are very cautious with this claim as it would mean a significant upgrade to memory bandwidth compared to the Turing series. There is simply no need to launch such a fast graphics card right now, but rather, leave this upgrade opportunity for the “2021 SUPER refresh”.

RTX 3080 Series to use bigger GPU and wider memory bus

The most interesting rumor so far is certainly the claim that GeForce RTX 3080 would use a GA102 GPU instead of GA104. This goes contrary to the path NVIDIA took with the last 3 generations. The xx80 models have been sticking to xx104 GPUs for quite a while, with the last ‘big GPU’ reference model being the GTX 780.

But the reason for this change could actually be quite simple: NVIDIA wants to put more memory on the xx80 series (RTX 3080) and the choice was either to use 16GB 256-bit or 10GB 320-bit. The capacity does not really have to that be much bigger, because the bandwidth will increase anyway. However, NVIDIA has not upgraded the frame buffer size for their xx80 models ever since GTX 1080 came out. Thus, it is simply expected at this point. Using the board for Ampere GA102 GPU (PG133) designed for a 384-bit bus unlocks more memory options such as 11GB 352-bit or 10GB 320-bit.

A new power connector

The most bizarre rumor so far is the claim about a new power connector exclusively for the Founders Edition. The leak with RTX 3080 Founders Edition has revealed that the sample had no regular power connectors attached directly to the board. There was simply no trace of it. NVIDIA could simply add the power connectors to the back of the card, as they did with RTX 2070FE (pictures here), or they could make a new connector that takes less space but requires an adapter. This rumor has not yet been confirmed, but it is a fact that the leaked picture did not show any regular PCIe power connectors.

RTX 3070 Series

According to kopite7kimi’s latest tweet, the RTX 3070 Series (Ti/SUPER etc), would use GA104 GPU with the high-end variants using the ‘400’ GPU model. What this means is that the 3070 Ti/SUPER would feature the full silicon with all CUDA cores enabled. These rumors would be in line with speculation regarding RTX 3080 series using the GA102 GPU instead. The whole lineup would simply move one GPU-tier higher than normally.

A new tweet was made later listing 250W TGP and 220W TGP for GeForce RTX 3070S and RTX 3070 non-S respectively. We have added this to our later in this post.

Rumors combined

We have gathered all rumors that caught our attention. We are likely to go back to this chart and verify how much has turned out to be true.

The rumored specifications of NVIDIA Ampere RTX series

Sources: various (check links in the post)