Rumor has it that two unreleased graphics cards from the Nvidia RTX 30 series, the RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB, have been canceled.

According to two sources interviewed by VideoCardz, Nvidia has decided to scrap the two graphics cards that were supposedly in development. This leaves the matter a bit up in the air, given that not only is the cancellation a rumor, but the existence of these two graphics cards was also only loosely suspected based on previous hearsay. [RTX 3080 20GB, RTX 3070 16GB, and RTX 3070 Ti 16GB. The confirmed RTX 3080 will be available today (if inventory can be found) with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, and the RTX 3070 will be available on October 29 with 8GB of GDDR6.

And why so much memory? The proposed change has often been associated with AMD's upcoming RX 6000 series GPUs built on the RDNA 2 architecture. It has been almost officially confirmed that this high-end card will feature 16GB of GDDR6 memory, providing a memory buffer advantage over Nvidia's comparable lineup. However, it depends on whether AMD can beat Nvidia in both price and performance, neither of which has been confirmed at this time.

The subsequent cancellation of Nvidia's cards could be seen as a sign of Nvidia's relative calm in the face of the RX 6000 series, but that is not the only leading theory. For one thing, Nvidia may simply be waiting until a later date or super lineup to release a higher memory specification. Another possibility is that they are afraid of weakening the prospects of the RTX 3090 with 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

Or the whole thing could have been completely made up somewhere. When we spoke to graphics card manufacturers, they had no idea that 20GB or 16GB cards were in development. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't be too surprised to find out that Nvidia was just teasing AMD about the 20GB/16GB thing.

There are a lot of unresolved threads in this case, but it is interesting enough to speculate what happened to these legendary cards. At the very least, once we know where the RTX 30 and RX 6000 series stand, we can be sure that more battles will be fought in the graphics card market.