The are no certainties in the PC gaming rumour mill, but still Chinese site, MyDrivers (via @momomo_us), seems unusually confident in the latest speculation about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti release date. Stating, without irony, that the RTX 3080 Ti "is almost certain to be released around mid-April" could be setting itself up for a fall should that turn out to be little more than an early April Fool's joke.
But, given the fact that more and more potential GeForce RTX 3080 Ti noises have been echoing around the incestuous world of hardware rumour-mongers, the old no smokey, fire, fire adage would seem to apply here.
It seems very likely now that the RTX 3080 Ti is on the Nvidia roadmap this year, but, as we've reported before, seemingly in a very different guise to the original 20GB version that was planned for after the initial GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 cards were released.
We certainly know of one GPU partner who had the 20GB version planned in, but scrapped it seemingly once the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT cards were released.
The latest speculative specs for the RTX 3080 Ti have it sporting the same 12GB of VRAM as the recently launched GeForce RTX 3060, but using GDDR6X instead. It's also suggested that the GA102 core is going to come with 10,240 CUDA cores as opposed to the full 10,496 that had originally been suggested.
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We're also pretty confident that when Nvidia's Collete Kress says that "Starting with the 3060, we're taking an important step to maximize the supply of GeForce GPUs for gamers," she means that we can expect new cards with Ethereum hash rate limiters to be released this year. So long as that limiter remains unhacked...
A mid-April RTX 3080 Ti release date does at least make sense, given that we'll be over six months on from the original Ampere launch. And that would make it a great time for Nvidia to launch a new $999 graphics card.
And who knows, maybe we'll even be able to buy one. Sorry, that was an absurdly tasteless joke. I apologise.
