NVIDIA GeForce “RTX 3070 Ti” leaks along with fellow GA104 part: two different cards or is this the GTX 1060 all over again?

Tipster @kopite7kimi revealed what appear to be specifications for multiple Ampere GA104 GPUs. According to the tipster, these two cards will be called the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070, respectively. 

According to the leak, the top-end SKU, GA-104-400, will feature a fully-enabled GA104 GPU with 3072 CUDA cores. This part will likely be called the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. A lower-end variant, meanwhile, will launch with 2944 CUDA cores -the leak seems to indicate that this will be the GeForce RTX 3070. 

However, a look at NVIDIA’s segmentation practices over the past few generations tells us that these two GPUs might not necessarily be the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070: we’re thinking here that both of these parts will either just be called the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or the GeForce RTX 3070. 

Different specifications under the same name? NVIDIA has done this in the past, and not just with the abysmal DDR4 variant of the GT 1030. The GTX 1060 is a case in point here. The 3GB variant of the GeForce GTX 1060 wasn’t given an alternate name despite the fact that NVIDIA shaved off 128 CUDA cores, along with 3GB of VRAM.

Even early in the Turing era, NVIDIA offered OEMs differently binned variants of their TU104 and TU102 silicon targeting different performance levels. Apart from the loss of 128 CUDA cores, TU104-300 doesn’t seem t differ from the higher-end silicon. While the rumor hints that TU104-400 could feature GDDR6X as a further differentiator, this hasn’t been confirmed. 

The performance differential between a GeForce Ti part and an x70 (or x60 or x80 part, for that matter) is typically non-trivial, in excess of 10-15 percent. A 3072 CUDA core RTX 3070 would be faster than a 2944 CUDA core variant, but only marginally so. 

Keeping this in mind, we think it’s possible that both GA104-400 and GA104-300 represent a single functional card, which could potentially cause some confusion when it comes to OEM models. 

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