Some Nvidia RTX 30-series graphics cards could get a VRAM bump this year

In the lead up to Christmas, it looks like Nvidia will be giving the gift of more memory to some of its current GPUs. Twitter user, Hongxing2020, who was responsible for previous Nvidia GPU leaks, has once again spilled the beans on Nvidia’s plans to RAMp things up.

The tweet (spotted by Videocardz) points to new 12GB models of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 that will be officially announced and launched next month on December 7. That leap from only 6GB to a full dozen will likely help the Turing architecture cards compete against the AMD Radeon RX 6600 and 6700 cards. 

However, it does still mean Nvidia is planning to rerun at least one Turing card, which is likely more due to a lack of supply than demand. 

Higher tier cards are also rumoured to be getting a boost, with the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 both getting upgrades from 8GB  to 16GB and 10GB to 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM respectively. The announcement for these is reportedly planned for December 17, and should hit shelves about a month later on January 11th. There’s no news as to whether we’ll see the RTX 3080 10GB models hang around, given the relatively small jump.

While the RTX 3070 Ti looks likely to run with the more familiar GA104-401 GPU, boasting 6144 CUDA cores, the new RTX 3080’s may be different. These cards were listed with GA102-220 GPU, so there could be additional changes.

Another piece of speculation is whether or not these cards will feature any upgrades to power with the new PCIe Gen5 compatible cable, rumoured to appear in earnest with the new RTX 3090 Ti, but also potentially a match for the RTX 30-series connector already in use.

Don’t be too sad if you’ve just read that your current card is now a few gigs behind. These boosts, while appreciated, probably won’t make much difference for PC gaming today. It’s in a few years time these cards will prove their strength, at which point hopefully upgrading won’t require a help article due to mass shortages.