The RTX 3080 12 GB is still a rumored card, despite the increasing amounts of evidence towards its eventual release. The card's refreshed VRAM amount in particular seems to be an important part of NVIDIA's competitiveness plan, not only against AMD's RX 6000-series, which sport a psychological (and sometimes practical) advantage with their 16 GB VRAM capacities; but against Intel and its upcoming ARC Alchemist launch, which are expected to also offer 16 GB of VRAM at competitive shading performance levels.

But it seems that NVIDIA's refresh of the RTX 3080 graphics card won't be limited to a VRAM and bus width increase - CUDA core counts are now reported to have also increased by 2.9%, up to 8,960 from the RTX 3080 10 GB's 8,704 CUDA cores. The card is naturally still expected to make use of the GA-102 chip. An expected increased memory bus width of 384-bits will also bring about an increase in memory bandwidth, at 912 GB/s, the same as the RTX 3080 Ti (it stands at 760 GB/s for the RTX 3080).

Igor's Lab has posted an interesting investigative article where he advances a possible reason for the recent crash to desktop problems for RTX 3080 owners. For one, Igor mentions how the launch timings were much tighter than usual, with NVIDIA AIB partners having much less time than would be adequate to prepare and thoroughly test their designs. One of the reasons this apparently happened was that NVIDIA released the compatible driver stack much later than usual for AIB partners; this meant that their actual testing and QA for produced RTX 3080 graphics cards was mostly limited to power on and voltage stability testing, other than actual gaming/graphics workload testing, which might have allowed for some less-than-stellar chip samples to be employed on some of the companies' OC products (which, with higher operating frequencies and consequent broadband frequency mixtures, hit the apparent 2 GHz frequency wall that produces the crash to desktop).

Another reason for this, according to Igor, is the actual "reference board" PG132 design, which is used as a reference, "Base Design" for partners to architecture their custom cards around. The thing here is that apparently NVIDIA's BOM left open choices in terms of power cleanup and regulation in the mounted capacitors. The Base Design features six mandatory capacitors for filtering high frequencies on the voltage rails (NVVDD and MSVDD). There are a number of choices for capacitors to be installed here, with varying levels of capability. POSCAPs (Conductive Polymer Tantalum Solid Capacitors) are generally worse than SP-CAPs (Conductive Polymer-Aluminium-Electrolytic-Capacitors) which are superseded in quality by MLCCs (Multilayer Ceramic Chip Capacitor, which have to be deployed in groups). Below is the circuitry arrangement employed below the BGA array where NVIDIA's GA-102 chip is seated, which corresponds to the central area on the back of the PCB.