20gb variant of the RTX 3080 is in the pipeline

We’ve seen some hints from GPU manufacturer Galax that there could be more cards coming to the Nvidia GeForce 30 Series lineup, including a 20GB variant of the 3080, an upgraded variant of the RTX 3070, and an entry-level 3060.

Well this sure is an interesting development. Nvidia has just finished impressing PC users around the world with the excellent gaming performance of their new GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, which has been so successful out of the gate that it’s taken even Nvidia themselves by surprise, but things aren’t stopping there.

We already know that the RTX 3090 is due out imminently, but Nvidia is also planning some more cards to expand their product lineup going forward, at least according to a roadmap from card manufacturer Galax.

The sneakily snapped photograph that shows an internal roadmap for future graphics cards suggests the existence of a couple more variants of 30 Series GPUs from Nvidia than we knew about.

Nvidia has already confirmed the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090, but here we see a few new cards. Here are the additional cards that Nvidia has in the pipeline:

This is a particularly interesting card, perhaps designed to fill the rather large gap between the $699 price for the RTX 3080 and the $1,499 price for the RTX 3090. There’s a lot of room between those two cards, so we could very easily imagine a variant of the RTX 3080 with double the VRAM sitting somewhere in the middle of these two price points. Despite the overall excellent performance and features of the RTX 3080 with games currently on the market, not offering a big jump in VRAM compared to previous GPU generations is perhaps its largest shortcoming, which could be a challenge for future releases. Perhaps this 20GB variant could be designed to address that issue.

Catchy name, no? This is an internal name for an upcoming card, and isn’t representative of its customer-facing branding. It’s going to sit somewhere between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080, and prior naming conventions would suggest that this will end up being either an RTX 3070 Ti or Super.

With even the RTX 3070 being firmly in the mid-range pricing range, it’s no surprise that Nvidia would be working on some kind of entry-level card for their 30 Series lineup. This would likely be a solid choice for 1080p based gaming, and for players that want a low power card that will be able to run modern games, even if with some of the settings dialed down. These types of cards don’t have the huge profit margins that an individual high-end card has, but can be sold at scale to huge numbers of users, especially in prebuilt desktops.

Whatever these precise cards end up being, when they release, and how much they will all cost are still up in the air. Nvidia could very easily be keeping this info in their pocket to counter AMD’s planned announcements for their 6900xt and other Big Navi based GPUs we’ll be hearing about soon.