NVIDIA Files Patent for 3080 Amid Reports of 7nm Navi Based Radeon RX 3080 GPUs

The GPU war between AMD and NVIDIA has taken a weird turn, with reports claiming that AMD‘s top-end Radeon Navi graphics card will be called the RX 3080, one-upping the Turing based RTX 2080. It’s nothing sinister, just human psychology- a 3080 is better than a 2080, regardless of how they perform. AMD’s CPU team did the same thing with the X370 chipset to challenge Intel’s Z270 platform, following which the company had to change its naming scheme.

If you look at the Radeon lineups over the past years, you’ve got the Polaris based RX 400 and RX 500 series and then on the higher-end, the Radeon Fury X, followed by the Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64, and now finally the 7nm Radeon VII. It’s clear that team red’s GPUs don’t have a clear-cut naming scheme, so it won’t really matter if they name the Navi family as the RX 3000 series. This might persuade many of the less aware consumers to opt for the AMD offerings instead of the RTX Turing cards, despite the latter being faster.

In order to prevent that from happening, NVIDIA has filed a patent for the numbers 3080, 4080 and 5080. This was filed at the EUIP and it’ll be interesting to see how this whole scenario pans out, and ultimately which naming scheme will AMD’s Navi GPUs finally adhere to. The new graphics cards are expected to be announced either during Computex or at E3 next month. The release will probably come at a later date, with some sources pointing to 7th July (7/07) as the tentative day to highlight the 7nm process.

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