Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU leak points towards an eye-watering price tag – 24GB of GDDR6X?

Nvidia’s preparing to announce its RTX 30 series of graphics cards on September 1st, with Jensen Huang taking centre stage at a “Geforce Special Event“. 

Now, Nvidia’s next-generation flagship has leaked specifications and a rumoured price tag. This information comes from wjm47196, a leaker from the Chiphell forums. Nvidia will reportedly be dropping its XX80 Ti branding and create a new flagship GPU model called the RTX 3090. This new graphics card will reportedly release with a price tag of $1399, with Nvidia’s Founders Edition models releasing with a $100 price premium for $1499. 

Nvidia’s new gaming flagship will reportedly release with 24GB of GDDR6X memory, a new memory type which delivers more raw bandwidth than today’s GDDR6 modules. Micron revealed last week that GDDR6X memory will offer memory speeds of between 19Gbps and 21Gbps, offering Nvidia up to a 50% increase in bandwidth over the 14Gbps GDDR6 memory that’s used on their RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.  

What’s worth noting is that Micron’s GDDR6X documentation mentions Nvidia’s RTX 3090 graphics cards, and lists 12GB as its frame buffer. This information conflict means that either Micron or wjm47196 are wrong regarding the RTX 3090’s memory specifications. Micron’s listings suggest that Nvidia will use a 384-bit memory bus on its RTX 3090 graphics card, making both 12GB and 24GB GPU models possible with 12 1GB or 2GB GDDR6X modules.

If Nvidia opts to release its RTX 3090 graphics card with 24GB of VRAM, Nvidia will need to justify such a massive allotment of VRAM to gamers. Both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will offer 16GB of combined system memory to their users, making 24GB overkill, even next-generation games.   

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s rumoured RTX 3090 graphics card on the OC3D Forums.