Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti graphics card could soon get a big upgrade

Nvidia could be preparing a new spin on the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti going by the latest leak concerning Team Green’s graphics cards.

This one was aired by prominent leaker @harukaze5719 on Twitter (as highlighted by Wccftech), who spotted a new RTX 3070 Ti variant listed by Gigabyte with the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission).

Among of bunch of listings for some other cards – mainly existing models, but there could be a twist on that, we’ll come back to that later – there’s one for a ‘GV-N307T GAMING OC ST-16GD’, which translates to a Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti Gaming OC graphics card with 16GB of VRAM.

As you may be aware, the RTX 3070 Ti version that currently exists is limited to 8GB of video RAM – the same amount as the RTX 3070 – so this possible refresh on the graphics card is doubling that up, a major memory upgrade.

Interestingly, we have seen Gigabyte previously file an RTX 3070 Ti 16GB version with the EEC, right back at the start of the year. Obviously that never happened, but it looks like the plan may be back in the cards…

Analysis: More evidence of how Nvidia’s ‘layering’ strategy might work?

That previous EEC filing underlines why we should always be suitably skeptical around leaks like this. Just because a graphics card model appears at the EEC – something that normally happens when the product is close to release – does not mean it’ll necessarily hit the shelves. Sometimes speculative filings are made with the organization, placeholder entries that don’t come to fruition, as we saw with the previous 3070 Ti 16GB from Gigabyte.

That doesn’t mean it won’t happen this time round, of course, and the big ‘however’ here is that we recently heard chatter on the grapevine about a refresh of the RTX 3070 Ti which uses the GA102 GPU (the higher-end chip which is the engine of the RTX 3080 and 3090), rather than the GA104 which drives the RTX 3070 Ti currently.

And when rumors back each other up like this, they gain a bit more credibility – although we’re still remaining very cautious on this one. It’s also worth noting that the previous rumor suggests that the new spin on the RTX 3070 Ti could be limited to one region, perhaps (China maybe). Furthermore, the past leak didn’t mention upping the VRAM either (though we could even get a version with doubled VRAM and that new GA102 chip).

That last rumor also pushed the notion that Nvidia is readying not just an RTX 3070 Ti variant, but an RTX 3060 with 8GB of VRAM (rather than 12GB). Now, the EEC filing from Gigabyte does not show this purported refresh – there is a new 3060 card listed, but still with 12GB. So, make of that what you will, but there was also talk of an RTX 3060 Ti with faster GDDR6X memory – 8GB in this case, which is the standard loadout with the current graphics card – and a new RTX 3060 Ti model is listed here. So maybe that’s a version with the aforementioned pepped-up VRAM.

Ultimately, we can’t be sure about any of this, but what we can say is that rumors are increasingly pointing to Nvidia at least putting out one or two fresh versions of its existing Ampere graphics cards (possibly as soon as next month).

This would appear to be part of the overall near future GPU rollout strategy for Team Green, as the company has said that it intends to layer current-gen offerings with next-gen. And with high-end RTX 4000 graphics cards coming first, likely the RTX 4090 and 4080, it makes sense that the RTX 3070 and 3060 would be the layered refreshes to tide things over until their Lovelace successors turn up, maybe not until 2023.

The RTX 4060 certainly isn’t expected until next year, and the more we hear, the more we’re thinking this might be the case for the RTX 4070, with Nvidia purportedly considering pushing out two quite different versions of the RTX 4080, one of which could be in lieu of the 4070 in theory. Admittedly, that’d be something of an odd move, but we won’t have long to wait to find out if it’s true – Nvidia’s big reveal for next-gen Lovelace GPUs is only a couple of days away now.