According to IgorsLab, more delays have sprung up for Nvidia's highly rumored RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti 16GB, which could have been the best graphics cards to buy for the holidays. Both cards' original rumored release date was December 17th, but now that date has reportedly been pushed back significantly to somewhere around Chinese New Year.
Igor notes that initial samples of the RTX 3090 Ti could arrive in time for CES 2022, which starts around January 5th. However, the actual release date for the 3090 Ti isn't happening until closer to Chinese New Year, which begins in early February for us in the United States. The delayed launch is allegedly related to supply constraints, preventing more rapid production of the new flagship GPU. Pricing and volume are still unknown at this time.
The rumored RTX 3090 Ti would be Nvidia's new flagship for the Ampere lineup with a fully enabled GA102 GPU featuring 10,752 CUDA cores and operating at an incredibly high 450W TDP. In addition, the RTX 3090 Ti may also get a big memory upgrade making it the first Nvidia GPU to break a solid 1000GB/s of memory bandwidth. The new GeForce 3090 Ti will do this by using updated Micron GDDR6X modules that run at an impressive 21Gbps.
The new Micron modules have also been upgraded to 2GB per IC, meaning Nvidia can potentially reduce the number of memory modules on the RTX 3090 Ti to 12 instead of 24. This would allow Nvidia to put all the memory ICs back on one side of the card. This move would improve memory cooling capabilities for the card and could make the graphics card easier to build and more reliable to use. For more details, check out our coverage here.
The RTX 3070 Ti's story is more complicated as it involves competition from Intel, at least according to Igor. Nvidia is believed to be specifically targeting the RTX 3070 Ti 16GB refresh at Intel's new Arc graphics cards, which will arrive sometime in 2022. There's the possibility that Nvidia wants to wait and see Intel's new Arc GPUs in action before throwing a counterpunch.
As for a release date, Igor believes Intel will only enter the market after the Asian holidays, which in reality is another 2 to 3 months. If Nvidia is holding on until Intel releases its GPUs, it'll be a while before we see an RTX 3070 Ti 16GB in our hands.
Igor also briefly updated us on the rumored RTX 3080 12GB, saying that the card is no longer being discussed at all by his sources. This probably means the card was canceled by Nvidia in favor of the RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti 16GB, which makes sense. However, the RTX 3080 12GB would only have two extra gigabytes of VRAM over the standard RTX 3080, which is a minimal improvement by today's standards. Nvidia would probably want to upgrade the card to 20GB to make a new 3080 refresh worth it.
