As the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series of graphics cards gradually come to the market, gamers who prefer laptops have been left waiting for information on how the Ampere architecture might improve their gaming performance. Positive news may have arrived in the form of a leak, showing an image of a reported sample for the RTX 3070 Mobility GPU.
The leak appeared at the Chinese NGA forums, showing what appears to be an Nvidia GA104 processor in mobile form, complete with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. The GA104 is the processor used in the RTX 3070 desktop graphics card, and while the leak doesn't specify any details about the speeds or CUDA cores, the current RTX 20 Mobility Series matched the core counts and memory speeds of the desktop equivalent, but with reduced clock speeds and power usage.
If the RTX 3070 Mobility does use the same specifications, it would have 5888 CUDA cores, and potentially an absolute maximum boost clock of around 1.5 GHz, putting it within touching distance of the desktop card performance on a laptop. The leak also suggests that the mobile GPU will use Hynix low voltage GDDR6 memory, which is expected to be able to deliver up to 384 GB per second of bandwidth, around 15% less than the desktop equivalent.
Given that the RTX 3070 desktop graphics card is comparable to the RTX 2080 Ti for performance, the reduced clocks and memory speeds required for laptop use suggests that the RTX 3070 Mobility won't quite be able to match it. For laptop gamers wanting the ultimate in performance, the leaker also suggests that a mobile GPU based on the even more powerful GA102 Ampere processor, as used in the RTX 3080 desktop, is on its way. It is likely to be called the RTX 3080 Mobility, and would be far more certain to surpass RTX 2080 Ti performance.
Even though the RTX 3070 Mobility is unlikely to be able to exactly match the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti desktop card, it is pretty special that a laptop GPU will be able to achieve performance almost on a par with what was until recently, the most powerful gaming graphics card around. The fact that the RTX 3080 Mobility will almost certainly surpass that benchmark is even more stunning. Of course the RTX 30 Mobility Series GPUs won't be cheap, but then neither are the desktop cards their performance competes with.
Although the release date for the RTX 3070 Mobility is unknown, the fact that sample chips are being leaked suggests that it may not be too far off. Rumors expect Nvidia to official announce the range before the end of 2020, although with supply of the desktop RTX 30 Series cards being extremely limited, Nvidia may look to focus production on the desktop products first.
Nvidia RTX 3070 Mobility is yet to be officially announced.