Rumored Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Specs Hit the Sweet Spot
Nvidia might have already announced its GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, but the Ampere rumor mill never rests. Hardware insider @kopite7kimi, who was spot on with Ampere's specifications before launch, just revealed alleged specifications for another undetermined SKU that could well earn a spot on our Best Graphics Cards list.
According to the tweet, the leaker doesn't know if the card in question is the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or GeForce RTX 3060 Super. In either case, the graphics card will reportedly leverage the GA104 silicon, similar to the the one that's confirmed to be inside the GeForce RTX 3070. More specifically, according to kopite7kimi, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or GeForce RTX 3060 Super would land with the GA104-200 die and 4,864 CUDA cores.
As a quick recap, each streaming multiprocessor (SM) in Nvidia's Ampere architecture houses 128 CUDA cores, one RT core and 4 Tensor cores. If the core count is accurate, the GA104-200 die has 38 enabled SMs, amounting up to 38 RT cores and 152 Tensor cores.
On the memory side, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or GeForce RTX 3060 Super allegedly has 8GB of GDDR6 memory at its disposal. The memory speed and interface remains a mystery. However, the amount of memory insinuates a memory bus of 256-bit, like the GeForce RTX 3070. The GeForce RTX 3070 is rumored to use 14 Gbps memory, so it's possible Nvidia is looking to give this unconfirmed card slower GDDR6 memory chips to differentiate it from the RTX 3070 in terms of memory bandwidth.
Release Date?
As per Nvidia's Ampere launch schedule, the GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 come out on September 24 and 17, respectively, while the GeForce RTX 3070 arrives at an unspecified date in October.
AMD is expected to announce Big Navi on October 7, so if the rumored GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or GeForce RTX 3060 Super is real, it's likely Nvidia's waiting to unveil it until after it sees what AMD drops, suggesting a potential November launch for the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or GeForce RTX 3060 Super.
