Up til now, Nvidia has been using a GA104 GPU variant to power the RTX 3060 Ti graphics card. That may soon change, however, as Nvidia's 511 Studio driver has introduced a new ID for RTX 3060 Ti SKUs, suggesting we might get a third variant of the mid-range graphics card.

According to VideoCardz, the RTX 3060Ti appears in the Studio driver 511 with a new ID of ‘2414', which matches the PCI Device family of the GA103 GPU. This was then confirmed by @kopite7kimi, who specified that the GA103-200-A1 GPU will be the variant used for these new RTX 3060 Ti cards.

GA103-200-A1

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) January 14, 2022

With Nvidia using a new GPU for the RTX 3060 Ti, it's possible we may see the card's stock improving. Some retailers have said they haven't received a single batch of RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards for months, leading us to believe that Nvidia is prioritising the production of higher-tier cards such as the RTX 3080 and 3070 series. These higher-tier cards use the same GA104 GPU found on RTX 3060Ti  cards, so it makes sense for Nvidia to maximise profit by using these dies on more expensive models.

If Nvidia does actually use the GA103 GPU on RTX 3060 Ti cards, don't expect core specifications to change, as despite the GA103 GPU being rumoured to feature 7680 CUDA cores, it would like have some SMs disabled for the 3060 TI. However, it's possible the cards' overclocking headroom and power consumption might be affected, hopefully for the better.

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KitGuru says: Considering the GA103 GPU specifications, we wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia also used it for RTX 3070 cards, limiting the GA104 GPUs for the RTX 3070 Ti and above.

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