According to Videocardz’s sources, NVIDIA is now planning to launch the RTX 3080 20 GB variant sometime in December. We had first heard about the 20GB variant before the Ampere series was announced and it had originally been planned for release just after AMD’s Big Navi. This new timeline would represent a delay of about a month or so – assuming AMD goes with a hard launch of their Big Navi series and NVIDIA would not have made such a decision lightly.
NVIDIA RTX 3080 20 GB tentatively launching in December
The NVIDIA RTX 3080 would be based on the PG132 SKU20 and has been in the pipeline for quite some time. While it features the same CUDA Cores (as per leaks) it has twice the amount of memory. Considering the fact that killer apps like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 already chomp away all the vRAM the 2080 Ti had to offer, 10 GB is going to feel tiny after a year or two. Considering next-gen consoles are already driving games with asset-streaming of large worlds, vRAM is going to start becoming a lot more crucial than before. With AMD launching a card with 16GB of vRAM, NVIDIA had to reply with their own high vRAM card.
This is also one reason we highly recommend users go for the RTX 3090 or wait for the RTX 3080 20 GB. With this much amount of shading power, you will want to have a complimentary memory buffer. According to Videocardz, the card will be landing in December. This makes two cards (the RTX 3070 16GB and the 3080 20GB) that NVIDIA is going to be launching before the end of the year and will be in direct response to AMD’s Navi series of GPUs. I am personally expecting [caution: opinion] AMD’s flagship Navi GPU to have performance levels just under an RTX 3080 so AMD should really go after the price/performance sweet spot, forcing NVIDIA to do the same [/opinion].
Also keep in mind that Jensen is notorious for shifting things around at the last second so don’t be surprised if this date changes as well. But based on the delayed timeline, I expect NVIDIA is trying to stock up on supply to have a launch that is unlike the OG Ampere lineup. This also lends credence to something we have been saying for multiple weeks now: that RTX 30 supply will improve significantly before the end of the year as the stock with good yields kicks in.
To those who are hearing this for the first time, our sources told us that the current supply/demand situation was pre-meditated in the sense that NVIDIA did not want to place too large an order when Samsung’s 8nm yields were less than perfect. The company waited for the yields to improve and they expect the bulk of the volume to hit sometime around the holiday season. This premeditated lowering of supply combined with bot scalping attacks and the return of mining made sure that gamers would find it very hard to get their hands on any RTX 30 GPU.