Editor’s opinion: Since its launch in September, there are no new Nvidia RTX GPUs on the shelves. Since launching in November and December, there are no new AMD Radeon GPUs on the shelves. Let’s call this first round, declare a draw and look at the second round: when there are cards on the shelves and players can vote with their wallets, who will be the champion?
Nvidia, says Nvidia. (Paraphrased for clarity).
Nvidia came out swinging with the RTX 3000 series, but they have an amazing left hook waiting on the wings. Asus accidentally confirmed the existence of the RTX 3080 Ti, and revealed that it has 20 GB of memory. The new card targets the RX 6900 XT.
There have been rumors of a 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080 for months, as well as similar updates in the stack: 16 GB RTX 3070 models and 12 GB and 6 GB RTX 3060 models are also expected. Jeff Fisher of Nvidia, senior vice president of GeForce, is expected to announce them at a virtual event on January 12. Rumors suggest a launch in February.
In the performance spectrum, Ti models will be slightly above their vanilla equivalents. The increase in memory will provide a few percentage points of improvement, more at higher resolutions, and rumors of an increase in clock speed and number of cores may complete a ~ 10% upgrade. Their prices could be raised the same way in the worst case scenario, but they are more likely to fall a hair above current MSRPs. Vanilla models can also be discounted as a result.
But the questions remain. If Nvidia is selling all the cards it can already produce, why do they need updated versions? (Does that mean they are anticipating more inventory?) If DLSS and ray tracing and the selling points of their GPUs, why don’t they prioritize them? (Okay, low blow on my behalf …) But, most importantly, will AMD strike back?