Rumor mill: With the chip shortage causing no end of grief for those looking to upgrade their graphics card, what should Nvidia do to help those who can't afford or find its products? Focus more on the production of its current low to mid-tier offerings, perhaps? If rumors are to be believed, the answer is to release a slew of new Ampere cards, ranging from the RTX 3050 to the RTX 3090 Ti.

The rumors come from VideoCardz and leaker @kopite7kimi, so take them with the usual dose of salt. The first is regarding a new version of the RTX 3080 that will use the GA102-220 GPU, come with 12GB GDDR6X memory, and use a 384-bit memory bus, possibly suggesting that the vanilla RTX 3080 with its 10GB of VRAM will be discontinued.

It's unclear whether the new RTX 3080 will carry the Super or Ti moniker, though the former seems more likely, given that there's already an RTX 3080 Ti that uses the GA102-250 GPU. As with previous Super cards, we can expect to see around a 5% to 10% performance gain compared to the standard RTX 3080.

Another rumor claims that a desktop RTX 3050 Ti is in the works with a GA106-150-A1 GPU. It will feature 3,072 FP32 cores and either 6GB or 12GB GDDR6 with a 192-bit bus interface, making it significantly more powerful than the laptop version. Kopite7kimi also believes there will be a non-Ti version that uses the GA107-350-A1 GPU (2,304 FP32 cores) and a 90W TGP.

Want more options? There's also said to be a 16GB version of the RTX 3070 Ti on the way, and Nvidia is rumored to be rereleasing the RTX 2060 with 12GB of memory. Additionally, anyone who has too much money could opt for the 450W RTX 3090 Ti.

Again, these are all rumors, but it wouldn't be surprising to see Nvidia announce a slew of new SKUs as part of a mid-life refresh for Ampere in January. But consumers frustrated at high prices and near-zero availability are unlikely to be overjoyed at the prospect of the company further complicating its lineup with a series of new cards that offer slightly more memory/performance. And we're still going to struggle to find them, anyway.

After a brief period during which their prices fell, the latest graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD have been on the rise since early August. In the case of team red, its RDNA 2 series is now 83% over MSRP on average.