Nvidia may be planning two Ti variants in the RTX 30-series to combat AMD's RX 6000 GPUs

Rumours are coming in thick and fast regarding the ways Nvidia may try to combat AMD's upcoming RX 6000 series graphics cards—the answer is always more graphics cards, by the way. Specifically, an RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti.

The RTX 3060 Ti is the more likely of the two, and has shown its face in a public GPU-Z validation page over on TechPowerUp (via VideoCardz and T4CFantasy). It's reportedly fit with 4,864 CUDA Cores, down from the 5,888 inside the Nvidia RTX 3070. They share one characteristic, however, and that's memory configuration, as according to the validation page the RTX 3060 Ti will come with 8GB of GDDR6 with a 256-bit bus—the same loadout as the RTX 3070 and offering 448GB/s bandwidth.

The validation page for the RTX 3060 Ti also suggests a GPU clock of 1,410MHz, and a GPU boost of 1,665MHz.

The RTX 3080 Ti is on slightly shakier ground, and I don't just mean in terms of how likely it is to release. Reference to this high-end card, which would sit between the now released RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, comes from Twitter leaker kopite7kimi, who suggests it would deliver 9,984 CUDA Cores and a 384-bit bus tied to GDDR6X memory.

That would see the rumoured RTX 3080 Ti sit a touch above the RTX 3080, at 8,704, and a little below the RTX 3090 at 10,496. It would also feature the same memory bus width as the RTX 3090, although it's likely to come with a GDDR6X VRAM capacity closer to the RTX 3080's 10GB than the 3090's 24GB.

Either way, there's already not a great deal between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090 in terms of gaming performance—the latter is more a low-key Titan than a GeForce card. With a difference of just over 10% in 4K gaming workloads, a proposed RTX 3080 Ti wouldn't have much room to play with.

But it's likely not a question of how an RTX 3080 Ti fits into its own stack, rather one of how it shapes up against AMD's upcoming RX 6000 series graphics cards. Rumour has it, these cards are shaping up to take on the RTX 3080, which would put them ahead of early expectations for performance. Initially AMD's high-end was purported to be aiming for the RTX 2080 Ti.

So perhaps this RTX 3080 Ti, if it actually exists, is a reactionary one to AMD's upcoming cards. Or at least a sign that Nvidia is weighing up its options in case it has to smash the 'in case of Radeon' glass come November—that's when we'll likely see AMD's so-called Big Navi card launch to the public and when the graphics card market is sure to erupt into competitive chaos. Or perhaps as soon as tomorrow, when AMD is set to unleash the RX 6000 series unto the world.

Nvidia is yet to officially confirm either the RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3080 Ti, but it's sure to have something up its sleeve to combat RDNA 2 in due time. The exact shape and spec of which, however, is probably TBD.