Nvidia has drawn first blood in the next-gen GPU wars with its GeForce RTX 30 series, and next month, AMD will fire back with its Radeon RX 6000 lineup. As we have seen with every previous generation, however, the battle will stretch well beyond the opening rounds. As it pertains to that, a leaked roadmap by one of Nvidia's add-in board partners hints that several more Ampere cards are right around the corner.
Specifically, it looks as though Nvidia is readying at least three more models, including a GeForce RTX 3060, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or Super, and another version of the GeForce RTX 3080 with 20GB of memory, twice as much as found on the current model.
The roadmap was shared during a Galax presentation in China. A photo of the roadmap first appeared in a now-deleted post on Baidu, but was later shared on Twitter by @9550pro (via Videocardz). Have a look:
🥲https://t.co/bWh2s9jEBY pic.twitter.com/JcUzD1B3BbSeptember 23, 2020
While obviously not official, it makes sense that Nvidia would have more SKUs in its GPU holster. Which ones materialize and when are factors that are likely dependent on how AMD's Big Navi performs. Nvidia's Ampere lineup is just three cards deep at the moment, but even the upcoming GeForce RTX 3070—the lowest SKU on the totem pole—is claimed to be faster than last generation's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
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That said, a GeForce RTX 3060 seems like a foregone conclusion. Not everyone is willing to spend $499 and up on a graphics card, so cheaper options are undoubtedly on the way, just as they arrived with every previous generation.
For those who are willing to spend a bit more, however, the roadmap indicates a part labeled as PG142 SKU 0. This sits between the 3070 ($499) and 3080 ($699), and is likely to be a Ti or Super variant of the 3070. Barring a reshuffling of Nvidia's introductory price points, we are probably looking at a $599 graphics card. Assuming the leaked roadmap is accurate, that is.
Pricing aside, there is certainly room to wedge another card in between the 3070 (5,888 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6 memory) and 3080 (8,704 CUDA cores, 10GB GDDR6X memory). The only thing that would be unusual is seeing a Ti or Super variant emerge so close to the launch of the regular models. But hey, the competitive landscape could be very different this round, if Big Navi lives up to the hype. We'll see.
