Looks like there may be a pumped-up version of the RTX 3060 Ti squeezing its way into Nvidia's Ampere graphics card line-up—the RTX 3060 Ultra.
The leaked custom ASUS TUF Gaming GPU, (via wccfech) looks to be packing a beefier memory capacity than even the RTX 3080, with 12GB of GDDR6 memory to call its own. It does have a smaller 192-bit memory bus (down from 256-bit), so accessing that memory may take a little longer. Don't worry about this affecting your games, though; at the speeds were likely to see, the difference is probably negligible.
This mid-low range card will pack the same 8nm process nodes as the rest of the 30-Series line-up, but contain fewer CUDA cores than its Ti counterpart—that's 3840 cores, as opposed to the RTX 3060 Ti's 4864 cores. It features a 2.7 slot, triple-fan design with 0dB cooling tech, and a robust aluminium casing, too.
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As an Ultra tier variant, the card is set to outperform the RTX 3060 Ti, even with that lower core count behind it. It may even give the RTX 3070 a run for its money, and it lines up nicely as a contender to AMD's Radeon RX 6700, though we're not exactly sure of the rest of the numbers just yet.
Expect to see the GeForce RTX 3060 Ultra announced at virtual CES, during Nvidia's Jan 12th keynote airtime. Said to be coming in at a reasonable $449, these new cards may be the missing piece some of us have been waiting for.
