Both AMD and Nvidia are expected to unveil their respective next-gen Radeon RX 7000 series and GeForce RTX 4000 series desktop GPU lineups soon. Despite that however, Team Green is reportedly working on new RTX 3000 series of Ampere cards according to a Twitter user @Zed_Wang.
The report claims that a trio of new 30-series cards are coming (the upgrades have been emboldened. They are:
- RTX 3060 8GB variant
- RTX 3060 Ti 8GB GDDR6X variant
- RTX 3070 Ti 8GB GDDR6X variant
While not necessary, an 8GB variant of the RTX 3060 isn"t such a bad idea as the original 12GB version has too much VRAM compared to the performance on offer. The RTX 3060 is a 1080p gaming card that competes with AMD"s RX 6600 and 6600 XT. Although the 12GB variant carries an official MSRP of $329, the GPUs typically are selling for around $399 currently.
Depending on how Nvidia designs the memory system of the new alleged 8GB 3060, the new card could be cheaper or priced similarly. A 128-bit memory interface could mean a very cheap RTX 3060 but it would also reduce the bandwidth of the card to around ~240GB/s and consequently its performance too.
So, a 128-bit 3060 seems highly unlikely as it wouldn"t be much better than the RTX 3050 due to severe bandwidth-hit. Instead, Nvidia may use a 256-bit wide memory interface which will raise the memory throughput of the card by 33% to around 480GB/s. As such, the card may be able to catch up to the AMD RX 6650 XT or even the RX 6700 10GB in raster performance.
Moving on, the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070 Ti are also set to receive memory upgrades to GDDR6X. This will lead to an increase in bandwidth albeit the memory capacity is rumored to remain the same. Hence, the two new SKUs could catch up to the RX 6750 XT and the RX 6800 in terms of rasterization.
Source: @Zed_Wang (Twitter)