Nvidia Ampere Series Refresh Leaked

According to a leak by kopite7kimi, a hardware leaker with an outstanding record, Nvidia is planning a refresh of its popular GeForce RTX 30 series of graphic cards. The supposed Ampere series refresh will provide cumulative improvements over the standard RTX 30 series. The new cards will surely bring a smile to the GPU-starved gaming population, providing it can get its hands on the new models, and they don’t come with a serious markup.

According to the leaks, the flagship graphics card, GeForce RTX 3090 Super, will get 10,752 CUDA cores and 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM memory, 84 RT, and 336 Tensor cores. It will be a 2,4% increase in CUDA cores compared to the original RTX 3090. The VRAM from the 3090 won’t be upgraded, but we doubt anyone will need more than 24GB anyway. In terms of power draw, older leaks from Greymon55 point to 400W power rating for GeForce RTX 3090 Super.

Next in the lineup, the GeForce 3080 Super will have 8,960 CUDA cores and come with 12 GB of GDDR6X memory. This is in line with the fairly disappointing 3080Ti card - the original GeForce 3080 had 8,704 CUDA cores and less memory, 10 GB of GDDR6X VRAM. The Tensor core count on the Super version will be 280, with 70 dedicated RT cores, a slight increase from the numbers on the original 3080 series cards. It will be weaker than the RTX 3080 Ti, though, which came 10,240 CUDA cores.

Through the Super upgrade, the popular GeForce RTX 3070 will receive 5,888 CUDA cores. The new version of the graphics card will also have 184 Tensor and 46 RT cores. This card’s main upgrade compared to the standard 3070 will be a move from GDDR6 to the faster GDDR6X memory. Other specs will remain mostly the same across the board, including the 8GB of VRAM that the 3070 and 3070Ti shipped with.

The most economical class in the Super upgrade, the GeForce GTX 3060 Super, will get the most significant upgrade. It will have 5,632 CUDA cores, 12 GB GDDR6 memory, 176 Tensor cores, and 44 RT cores. These specs would effectively make it more potent than the GeForce 3060 Ti. If this rumor turns out to be accurate, and the pricing is right, this card may just dethrone the highly sought-after RTX 2060 as the most popular RTX card among the masses.

All in all, another seemingly disappointing refresh by Nvidia, but let’s wait to see if the rumors are true first and then how the cards will perform in real life. Either way, with the current GPU shortage on the market, any gaming silicon will be welcome, which is something Nvidia no doubt counts on.