The internet's convinced that Nvidia are cooking up an RTX 3090 with 24GB of VRAM

Rumours about the upcoming line-up of Nvidia Ampere RTX 3000 graphics cards have intensified this week, as the latest internet gossip suggests that the expected RTX 3080 Ti won't be the graphics card sitting at the top of the Ampere foodchain. Instead, it's going to be the RTX 3090, according to new leaks from German tech site Igor's Lab, which is apparently going to have a massive 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

According to the leaked specs, the RTX 3090 will be built from the same underlying GPU chip as the RTX 3080 Ti (or Super, because who even knows that these cards are going to be called until Nvidia makes a proper announcement about them) and RTX 3080, but will have 24GB of double-sided GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit interface and a massive TDP of 350W.

The RTX 3080 Ti, meanwhile, will apparently have 11GB of regular GDDR6X memory, a 352-bit interface and a TDP of 320W, while the regular RTX 3080 will have 10GB of GDDR6X memory, a 320-bit interface and the same 320W TDP as its Ti sibling. That's according to Igor's Labs' specs, anyway, but we won't know for sure until Nvidia hold their own launch event for them. It's not uncommon for Nvidia to re-use the same GPU for multiple cards, so that part of the leak is more likely to be true if there really is an RTX 3090 in production.

Other rumours have suggested the RTX 3090 is just the new name for Nvidia's Titan graphics cards, as the current Titan RTX card also has 24GB of memory at the moment, albeit regular GDDR6 rather than the GDDR6X purported by the leak.

The Titan RTX isn't really a consumer graphics card as such, what with it costing upwards of £2450 / $2500 and all, and is instead geared toward 3D rendering professionals who need that extra horsepower. It's possible that Nvidia might be in the process of repositioning their Titan cards as more consumer facing GPUs in an effort to persuade the hardest of the hardcore to part with even more cash than they know what to do with - a bit like what Intel have done with their Core i9 CPUs, for example - but again, there's no way to know for sure until Nvidia say something more concrete.

Either way, it sure looks like it's going to be an interesting couple of months as we wait for Nvidia to release their RTX 3000 cards, especially when AMD are due to launch their flagship 'Big Navi' cards before the end of the year as well. The new Big Navi cards will utilise AMD's 2nd Gen RDNA 2 architecture, and will also have ray tracing support for the very first time. Who will be sitting atop the best graphics cards throne come the end of the year? Only time will tell.