With the launch of the GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, Nvidia blew every other card out of the water in terms of performance. However, it now looks as though two variants of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 cards with more memory on board have been canceled.
Right now, you can go out and purchase a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, or pre-order an RTX 3070 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. As Videocardz reports, Nvidia was planning to release a 20GB RTX 3080 and a 16GB RTX 3070 in December in order to better compete with AMD’s Navi 21 Radeon RX 6900/6800 cards, all of which include 16GB of memory. Two independent sources have confirmed the new RTX cards are no longer coming to market, though.
It’s unlikely Nvidia will officially confirm it was even planning to launch the cards, let alone commenting on them being shelved. As to why the company would decide not to release them, it looks as though component supply and demand is to blame.
The existing RTX 3080 cards are proving hard to find due to very high demand and scalpers, as are pre-orders for the RTX 3070 launching next week. As WCCFTech points out, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stated “demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year,” meaning stock won’t become readily available until 2021 at the earliest. Introducing two new cards would only make that situation worse and leave consumers frustrated.
The supply of GDDR6X memory used by the RTX 3080 cards is also very constrained. Micron is the only company producing it and availability is classed as “poor.” With that in mind, shipping a new RTX 3080 requiring double the memory makes very little sense this year. 20GB and 16GB variants of these cards may still appear, but it now seems more likely they will form part of a more substantial graphics card refresh in 2021.
