Updated: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 could launch with two desktop versions in January.
GPU supply may be so tight that Nvidia has resorted to reviving the three-year-old RTX 2060 in a new configuration, but that apparently won’t stop the company from launching three new GPUs in January, according to a new report.
The information comes from Videocardz, which claims to have obtained a list of dates for desktop GPU announcements and subsequent launches.
According to the site, the first card out the door will be the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 16GB card, which will be announced on December 17 before becoming available to buy on January 11 2022.
Then both the entry-level RTX 3050 8GB — previously rumored as Nvidia’s defence against the upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist GPU — and top-of-the-range RTX 3090 Ti 24GB cards will follow at the end of the month on January 27.
Interestingly, of this pair, only the 3050 has an announcement date listed: January 4. That date could be very significant, given it also happens to be the day that Nvidia is scheduled to deliver an Executive Keynote at CES 2022 in Las Vegas.
The site also mentions a 12GB RTX 3080 card, but so far has not been able to confirm dates. But it is possible, therefore, that Nvidia will actually reveal four RTX 30 cards in January.
Obviously, all of this information should be taken with a pinch of salt, but as the alleged announcement of the RTX 3070 Ti is just eight days away, we should know how seriously to take the rest of the intel soon enough.
But perhaps a better question is whether it will make a material difference to your chances of getting a new GPU or not — and the answer is, unfortunately, “probably not.”
The perfect storm of chip shortages, Covid based supply chain disruption and the enduring appeal of high-end graphics cards to cryptocurrency miners means that cards are bought the moment they hit retailers’ virtual shelves — often by bots perpetually scanning them for possible additions to mining rigs. Even the RTX 2060 re-release has gone out of stock instantly, so it’s not like lower-level cards are immune to the massive supply and demand imbalance.
And while the situation has gotten so bad that the US government could intercede, realistically it’s a hard-to-solve problem without any obvious end in sight. Indeed, Nvidia’s own estimates say that supply isn’t expected to ease until 2023, by which point even these as-yet unannounced cards are rumored to have been superseded by the Nvidia RTX 40 series.
