It's Ampere time: NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 detailed in new leak

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • First details leak out about NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 video cards.
  • The leak suggests the RTX 3080 could feature up to 20GB of GDDR6 memory, with the RTX 3070 offering up to 16GB.
  • It also hints at more 3870 shaders for the RTX 3080, and 3072 shaders for the RTX 3070.

We're slowly starting to get more details on NVIDIA's next-gen architecture, Ampere. A report from last week suggested Ampere would deliver 50% better performance at half the power consumption, made possible by a shift to a 7nm manufacturing node.

We now have more details on the cards themselves, with MyDrivers posting initial specs of what could turn out to be the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070. The site has listed GA103 and GA104 as the possible GPUs for the first wave of Ampere cards, with the former associated with the RTX 3080 and the latter with the RTX 3070.

There's also a few specs to go along with the names. The GA103 GPU will allegedly offer 60 streaming multiprocessors with each holding 64 cores, leading to 3870 shader processors. The leak also suggests a 320-bit wide memory bus, and as noted by TweakTown, we could be seeing up to 20GB of GDDR6 video memory on the RTX 3080.

As for the RTX 3070, we're looking at up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit wide interface, along with 48 streaming multiprocessors resulting in 3072 shaders. Of course, this is all conjecture at this point, and it isn't likely NVIDIA will offer double the amount of VRAM over the RTX 200 series.

There's little in the way of official confirmation, and at this point we don't even know if Ampere will end up being the name for NVIDIA's next-gen architecture. We should have more details over the coming weeks and months as we lead up to GTC 2020 in March, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what do you want to see in NVIDIA's next-gen video cards? Share your thoughts in the comments below. And be sure to browse our collection of the best graphics cards for far more buying options currently available.

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Harish Jonnalagadda
Senior Editor - Asia

Harish Jonnalagadda is a Senior Editor overseeing Asia for Android Central, Windows Central's sister site. When not reviewing phones, he's testing PC hardware, including video cards, motherboards, gaming accessories, and keyboards.