NVIDIA RTX 3080 20GB, RTX 3070 16GB May Have Been Scrapped

The GeForce RTX 3000 series is supposed to be NVIDIA's latest and greatest and while it may still end up like that next year, for now, it's starting to become the company's embarrassment. The popularity of the cards, perhaps partly thanks to aggressive and successful marketing, has created a demand that NVIDIA is unable to quickly supply. Now, however, there are signs that it may even be cutting back on at least two configurations that would have given buyers more VRAM despite slightly lower specs.

The GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 were supposed to have high memory variants, 20GB and 16GB, respectively. This would be double what's available in the market or, in the case of the RTX 3070, still coming to shelves. As it stands, only the GeForce RTX 3090, the highest in the series, also has the highest amount of memory at 24GB.

If the information that VideoCardsz was able to gather is accurate, then it will remain the only one at that level. Its sources claimed that the SKUs for the 20GB RTX 3080 and 16GB RTX 3070 have been canceled, not postponed. These would have launched later this month or at least next month to compete with AMD's Radeon RX 6900 and 6800 with 16GB of RAM. It seems that won't be the case anymore and NVIDIA might be content with its lower memory options.

Then again, NVIDIA may have had little choice in the matter if yield issues are indeed the cause of the alleged cancellation. The RTX 3080 uses GDDR6X memory produced by only one manufacturer, Micron, and reported yields have not been encouraging. That theory, however, doesn't explain why the RTX 3070 would be affected since it uses a more common GDDR6 memory.

This new report doesn't look good for NVIDIA who already admitted to facing a surplus of demand, its preferred term to describe its supply issues. The company is confident it will be able to get supplies stabilized by next year, at which point it could revisit these scrapped models, presuming there's still market interest in them.