Leak suggests Nvidia is aiming to release a faster RTX 4080 in early 2024, but that's not going to fix the mess that is the Ada GPU line-up

pcgamer.com:

There's going to be a beefier GeForce RTX 4080 on its way in the first few months of 2024, so is the latest graphics card rumour on the social grapevine. The name, Super or Ti, has yet to be decided but it's supposed to be using a cut-down version of the AD102 GPU, that's the GPU currently powering the RTX 4090. Power limit is supposed to be less than 450W and the price range is similar to the RTX 4080's.

This is all according to MEGAsizeGPU on Twitter (via Videocardz) but as with any post on social media with precisely zero hard evidence to back it up, it's best to treat it as being no more than a shower thought, regardless of who actually posts it. That's said, there's some merit to breaking down what's actually being claimed.

Let's start with the use of the AD102. The current GeForce RTX 4080 uses the smaller cousin of Nvidia's top-tier GPU, the AD103. That has a maximum of 80 SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors, which contain all of the shaders, tensor cores, and ray tracing units) and a memory bus that's 256 bits in total width.

However, the version that's used in the RTX 4080 only has 4 SMs disabled and the rest of the die runs as normal. This means that there's little tangible benefit to creating a faster product using that chip, as a fully enabled AD103 running at the same clock speed as the one in the RTX 4080 would just be a few percent faster.

The AD102 has lots of potential, though. That chip has up to 144 SMs and the full bus width is 384 bits. The GeForce RTX 4090 uses one with 128 SMs enabled, so Nvidia could use one with, say, 100 SMs for an RTX 4080 Ti. This is the chip that's already used in the RTX 5000 Ada Generation workstation card and it runs with a similar clock speed to that in the RTX 4080, albeit