Here it is: The Nvidia RTX 3090. Or at least, one variant of the new GPU from hardware company Gainward, which appears to have accidentally posted product pages for the RTX 3090 and 3080 a little bit early.
A day before Nvidia's Ampere reveal event, where we expect Nvidia to officially show off the RTX 3090 and 3080 graphics cards, Gainward posted (and then removed) images and specs for its versions of each card, with specs that match up with previous leaks. The 3090 is a 24GB monster, while the 3080 comes equipped with 10GB of GDDR6X.
As spotted by Videocardz and our colleagues at Tom's Hardware, the Gainward product pages list four configurations for the 3090 and 3080, two of which are "Golden Sample" (aka factory overclocked) variants. You can see the full specifications at the Videocardz link.
Here are the key specs for the base models:
RTX 3090 Phoenix
- CUDA cores: 5248
- Clock speed: 1695 MHz (Boost)
- Memory: 24GB GDDR6X
- Memory clock: 9750 MHz
- Bandwidth: 936 GB/s
- PCIe: Gen 4
- Max power consumption: 350W
- Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a
RTX 3080 Phoenix
- CUDA cores: 4352
- Clock speed: 1710 MHz (boost)
- Memory: 10GB GDDR6X
- Memory clock: 9500 MHz
- Bandwidth: 760 GB/s
- PCIe: Gen 4
- Max power consumption: 320W
- Output: HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a
The biggest difference between the two is that huge jump in memory. For comparison, the RTX 2080 launched with 8GB of GDDR6 in 2018; the RTX 2080 Ti, released at the same time, had 11GB of GDDR6.
The amount of VRAM a graphics card has is especially important for gaming at 4K, where the larger frame buffer is especially memory hungry. Demanding games today can and will use more than 8GB. The RTX 3080 may not have much headroom at native 4K, then, while the RTX 3090 has tons; it looks like the card you'll want for Microsoft Flight Simulator, as long as you can pair it with a high-end CPU.
This time around there's no mention of a 3080 Ti at launch, which likely leaves the door open for a card in between the 3080 and 3090 in the future; perhaps a 3080 Ti or Super model with 16GB of memory. While we do expect Nvidia to announce a 3070, that model wasn't leaked on Gainward's site. Neither product page listed a price, but considering the specs, expect some big dollar signs tomorrow.
One other interesting tidbit: Gainward's spec sheets state that both the 3090 and 3080 models require two 8-pin power connectors, meaning they seemingly won't be using Nvidia's new 12-pin connector.
Reached for comment on the GPU pages, Nvidia responded "We do not comment on rumors or unannounced products."
