Rumour: Nvidia preparing to launch GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super in early 2020

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And back down the rumour rabbit hole we go with reports surfacing that Nvidia is preparing a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super for launch in early 2020. We’ve come full circle on this one, with rumours earlier in the year being quashed but now they’re very much alive again.

This is according to various ‘leaks’, in particular from kopite7kimi on Twitter, who accurately leaked info on the GTX 16 and RTX Super series. They also flubbed their scops on a 2070 Ti and a 1650 Ti, so attach as much worth as you deem necessary. The leaks suggest the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super uses the full Turing TU102 GPU used by the Nvidia Titan RTX.

As such, specs-wise, we could be looking at a graphics card which is very similar to the Titan RTX aside from memory. That means the full complement of 4608 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor Cores, 72 RT (Ray Tracing) cores, 288 TMUs and 96 ROPs. It would be a bit of a monster, basically, and is rumoured to be capped off with faster 16Gb/s GDDR6 memory, versus 14Gb/s  on the Titan RTX.

There are still a couple of question marks over this rumour though, aside from the veracity of it. There are the questions of how much VRAM the RTX 2080 Ti could ship with, the width of its memory interface, and the base and boost clock speeds of the GPU itself. These are the key aspects which are going to differentiate the RTX 2080 Ti Super from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and the Titan RTX.

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has 11GB GDDR6 at 14Gb/s, running on a 352-bit memory bus and providing total memory bandwidth of 616 GB/s. The Titan RTX has 24GB GDDR6 memory at 14Gb/s, this time on a 384-bit memory bus and providing overall memory bandwidth of 672 GB/s. Even assuming the RTX 2080 Ti stuck with 11GB GDDR6 and a 352-bit interface, the bump in memory clock speed would equate 704GB/s total memory bandwidth. If Nvidia opted for 12GB GDDR6 on the same 384-bit interface used by the Titan RTX, we’re talking an obscene 768GB/s memory bandwidth. For now, this is all conjecture, but we’d have quite a video card on our hands.

Things get even flakier when we try to drill down to clock speeds. Both the RTX 2080 Ti and the Titan RTX have base clock speeds of 1350 MHz, so this would be fairly likely. The RTX 2080 Ti offers boost clock speeds of 1545 MHz while the Titan RTX pushes it all the way up to 1770 MHz. The rumours suggest the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super will somewhat split the difference with a boost clock speed of ~1700 MHz.

What this is all eventually boils down to then is price and timing.  With the next-gen Ampere GPU allegedly set to debut in mid-2020 this would make an GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super an odd proposition. It would certainly be Nvidia’s fastest GeForce graphics card yet, and perhaps only just shaded by the Titan RTX, but it also runs the risk of being usurped within a handful of months by the expected GeForce RTX 3080/3080 Ti. 

Pricing will be key, particularly if Nvidia still wants to make the $2499 Titan RTX a vaguely tempting proposition for those with deep pockets. You can pick up an RTX 2080 Ti for somewhere in the region of $1100-1300, and we’d like to see a rumoured RTX 2080 Ti Super come in and effectively replace it at this price point. An accompanying price drop for the RTX 2080 Ti would be good as well, particularly if Nvidia hopes to have these graphics cards on the market side-by-side.

Or, in a another likely scenario, this entire rumour is bullshit and 2020 is all about the more predictable scenario of GeForce Ampere. Nvidia dipping its first toes into 7nm GPUs should be exciting stuff, to be honest, and would certainly cast a long shadow over another Turing GPU.