An RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3080 20GB graphics card might be on the horizon. Hkepc has reported that a RTX 3080 Ti might be in the works for Nvidia, with reportedly a GA102-250-KD-A1 GPU core and a 320-bit memory bus with 20GB of GDDR6X. All with a potential release of January 2021 at $999.99.
We also learned today that MSI has copyrighted "GeForce RTX 3080 20GB" badging for several of its graphics card lineups, indicating Nvidia might also be working on a high capacity VRAM variant of the RTX 3080, which is currently one of the best graphics cards.
However, it's possible that MSI copyrighted this name just in case Nvidia makes an RTX 3080 20GB.
So it seems that Nvidia may be working on both an RTX 3080 Ti and a RTX 3080 20GB, or just a RTX 3080 Ti. We won't know unless the vendor makes an official announcement.
Would an RTX 3080 20GB make sense from Nvidia's perspective? Sort of. A 20GB RTX 3080 would expand the card's longevity, particularly if you plan on gaming at high resolutions and playing the latest AAA titles.
A 20GB RTX 3080 would also serve as a good content creation GPU, where VRAM capacity is just as important as GPU horsepower.
One problem, though is cost. GDDR6X is already more expensive than GDDR6, and with 20GB of it, the 3080 20GB would for likely cost much more than an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and too close to any RTX 3080 Ti.
On the other hand, n RTX 3080 Ti at $999.99 with the same fully unlocked GA102 core as the RTX 3090 could be appealing. If Hkepc is correct about the 3080 Ti's specs, it'd be a real competitor to the RX 6900 XT. The 3080 Ti will reportedly have more VRAM, RT accelerated cores, tensor cores and Nvidia's NVENC ASIC for capturing high-quality gameplay with near-zero performance loss, which the 6900 XT lacks. However, based on the unconfirmed Nvidia specs, the RX 6900 XT may have the upper-hand in power efficiency.
