Between the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 comes another card with a limited GA102 chip
This week, attention is focused on the unveiling of AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics, which took place this Wednesday. But Nvidia is already preparing an answer to that. The company reportedly plans to offer another GeForce RTX 3000 model, which will be based on the most powerful Ampere chip, the GA102 GPU. The resulting card should have performance (and price) between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 while retaining 10GB of GDDR6X memory.
According to leaked information, Nvidia had previously intended to launch one more model among the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 graphics. It was supposed to be a card with full version of the GA104 chip, which is used in the RTX 3070, but it’s cut to 5888 shaders there. The new SKU was supposed to likely have full 6144 shaders and possibly a higher TDP as well as 16 GB of memory. But the SKU, which had the internal designation PG142 SKU 0/PG141 SKU 0, was in the end cancelled. But currently it looks like Nvidia will introduce a potentially much more powerful replacement that will use the larger GA102 chip instead.
This new version reportedly carries internal designation PG132 SKU 35. We do not know what the graphics card will be officially named at this point. GeForce RTX 3070 Ti could probably be used as its name, but no one has confirmed it yet. According to a fairly proven leaker Kopite7kimi who brought the news, this SKU will use newly introduced GA102 variant called GA102-150. This blend of the die will have significantly cut down number of computing units compared to the version used in the RTX 3080 (GA102-200), but interestingly will retain the same memory bus.
The SKU has 7424 active shaders (58 SM blocks, which also means 58 RT cores, 232 tensor cores) acording to Kopite7kimi. We don’t know the clock rate it will run at yet, but the TDP is said to be as high as for the RTX 3080, i.e. 320 W. The GPU could therefore run at similarly high, if not higher clock, although it is also possible that Nvidia will use higher voltages due to harvesting poorer quality silicon for this card, so there won’t be room for higher clock. In the case the GPU runs at the same clock speed as in RTX 3080, it will offer about 85% of the raw performance the GeForce RTX 3080 has.
GA102-150-KD-A1, 7424FP32, 320bits
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) October 23, 2020
However, the resulting gaming performance will probably be better, because the memory is supposedly not any slower, or only by a little. According to the leaker, the card still gets 10 GB of GDDR6X memory, i.e. the same 320-bit bus, and not the slower GDDR6 memory technology (this is probably so that the same PCB can be used as with the RTX 3080). This means that the bandwidth could be as much as 760 GB/s as with the RTX 3080. However, Nvidia could reduce the memory frequency a bit. A reason for that could be to allow the use of lower quality chips from Micron’s production.
So this card might have a relatively unpleasant power draw (and its high performance will compensate for that a little less than it does with the RTX 3080), but it could still be a very interesting SKU. These cropped variants using high-end chips often have a good price/performance ratio, which would be combined with large memory here. The price should also fall somewhere between RTX 3070 ($499) and RTX 3080 ($699). It’s hard to call if it’s going be exactly in the middle, or rather closer to one of these points.
Nvidia’s intention is to trump the Radeon RX 6800 with this card acroding to Kopite7kimi, so in theory it could be priced the same (579 $) while at the same time offering better performance. Of course, this is assuming that the performance of Radeon RX 6800 (which is a card with Navi 21 XL chip cut to 3840 shaders and 250W TDP) is even that high. In the end this card could also compete with the Radeon RX 6800 XT (4608 shaders, 649 $) from below by offering slightly lower performance but also lower price. Who knows.
This new Ampere card will also serve as an alternative to the RTX 3070 if you can’t stand only having 8GB of memory. The 16GB version of the RTX 3070 has been discontinued, as has the 20GB version of the GeForce RTX 3080, so this card is sort of a next best option with its 10 GB capacity, for such gamers.
English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi
