Rumour: First GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 Ampere 7nm specs leak – up to 20GB VRAM

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We’re in that quiet spot right before a new graphics card generation and the rumours are beginning to get a little wild, so take it will a smidgen of salt when we tell you that the specs for Nvidia’s next-generation Ampere GPUs have surfaced.

The specs for what appears to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3080 come from both @CorgiKitty on Twitter and Chinese website MyDrivers. Like we said, pinch of salt.

We’re looking at two separate GPUs, the weaker of which is the GA104 Ampere GPU. The leak claims this GPU will have 48 SM (Streaming Multiprocessors) and is available in either 8GB of 16GB VRAM configurations on a 256-bit memory interface. This is thought to be the upcoming GeForce RTX 3070.

The big one though is the Nvidia GA103 GPU. This has 60 SMs and either 10GB or 20GB GDDR6 memory, meaning a relatively unusual 320-bit memory bus is required. This unannounced GPU is expected to be the new flagship GeForce RTX 3080, at least until the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti rocks up eight months later.

This doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on, to be honest, aside from the VRAM receiving a nice boost and the naming being a little unusual. Nvidia has historically opted for even-number GPU codenames, particularly for its faster chips. We would’ve expected to see GA104 and GA102, which perhaps indicates that a faster GA102 GPU is in the pipeline.

Nvidia has already heavily indicated that its next-generation graphics card architecture will be 7nm Ampere, although there are also reports of it potentially being dubbed Hopper.

We’re at risk of speculating a ton over specs which are flaky at best though, even if we’re to assume this all true.

No doubt Nvidia will put all the rumours to bed soon enough though. With Big Navi on the horizon, Nvidia will undoubtedly be poised to unleash the GeForce 3000 series to counter it. All eyes would appear to be on Nvidia’s GTX 2020 event on March 22nd, where it’s expected Nvidia will lay out its plans for 2020 and beyond.