Rumors surrounding Nvidia’s incoming graphics card refreshes for Lovelace have increased significantly lately, indicating that this chatter may be carrying more weight – with the latest speculation being that an RTX 4080 Super with a VRAM upgrade is on the way.
Add spices abundantly here, but VideoCardz picked up a tweet from leaker Harukaze5719 on X (formerly Twitter), which referenced a new report from IT home (a Chinese tech site).
Benchlife has reached out to Nvidia’s AIC partners and has learned that the three SKUs have been confirmed in principle, but no specific information has been obtained. They only know that the new version of RTX 4080 will use 20 GB GDDR6X video memory.https://t.co/6clcqLA8jTOctober 22, 2023
IT Home noticed another recent leak on alleged 4070). Super Ti, but we have serious doubts about that last possible name, as we’ve said in the past).
IT Home reports that Benchlife (another Chinese site) has followed up on this, checking with Nvidia graphics card makers in Asia, and found that three new Lovelace models are indeed all but confirmed.
Strictly speaking, of course, nothing is confirmed until it is announced by Nvidia, but that is the language the – translated – article uses. In any case, you get the gist: it seems very likely that this will happen, at least if the sources are legitimate and correct.
However, we’re not getting any information on which updated models these will be – except for one nugget – so we think this underlines that Hongxing2020’s theories are speculation for now, and perhaps the exact direction Nvidia will take is still in the future. sky.
So what was the aforementioned nugget that surfaced? That the new version of the RTX 4080 (supposedly the Super) will have 20 GB of GDDR6X VRAM.
In other words, this RTX 4080 Super would upgrade the video RAM from 16 GB to 20 GB.
Analysis: To change chips or not?
Such an upgrade to 20GB would impact specs elsewhere, as a 20GB rig would require a heavier memory bus, so it would be upgraded from 256-bit to 320-bit. And for that to happen, the AD102 GPU would have to be used – not the AD103 that powers the RTX 4080.
Of course, if the RTX 4080 Super were to work with the AD102 chip – the engine of the RTX 4090 – it would be shortened appropriately to make sense compared to Lovelace’s flagship.
Other rumbling on the rumor millHowever, we doubt that the switch to AD102 would be made, as there is theoretically room to use the full capacity of the AD103 with an RTX 4080 Super. That’s because the vanilla RTX 4080 reduces the CUDA Core’s countdown a bit (it only uses 95% of the full count on that chip).
However, if this is the case and AD103 is used, an upgrade to 20 GB VRAM would not be possible (although the 16 GB video memory could be made slightly faster instead). At this point we have to take all of this as the speculation is, but the idea of Nvidia producing more than one refreshed graphics card, most likely for the RTX 4080 and 4070, is certainly gaining significant momentum.
We may see the RTX 4080 Super (or even Ti) in early 2024, if previous rumors from the rumor mill prove correct.