Rumor mill: According to fresh rumors, it seems a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti may be in the works, with a launch that may even preempt the vanilla RTX 3060. If this happens, the most logical explanation would be Nvidia is flexing its muscle to steal as much thunder from AMD's Big Navi release as possible.

The supposed RTX 3060 Ti would launch in October, the same month that Nvidia's upcoming RTX 3070 is supposed to arrive. As for when we could expect a standard RTX 3060, that's presently unclear. Early 2021 seems like a safe bet, though.

According to hardware leaker @kopite7kimi on Twitter, the RTX 3060 Ti will be based on the GA104-200 silicon. For reference, the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 both use GA102 variants, while the RTX 3070 also uses silicon carved from GA104 (GA104-300).

As for specs, the RTX 3060 Ti could use up to 4,864 CUDA cores, 152 Tensor cores, 38 RT cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 clocked at 14Gbps over a 256-bit wide bus. There doesn't appear to much information regarding clock rates, ROPs, etc.

Supposedly the RTX 3060 Ti would arrive with a TDP of 180W, marking a 40W reduction over the RTX 3070.

If the rumored specs are true, it looks like the RTX 3060 Ti will be targeting RTX 2080-like performance, potentially at a $399 price point. Pricing could end up being closer to $450, depending on how Nvidia wants to position it in the product stack. Meanwhile, the standard RTX 3060 may offer performance similar to the RTX 2070, and probably at a price closer to $350, but at this point these are merely educated guesses.

What's for certain is that Nvidia will be watching AMD closely to see what its RX 6000-series cards are going to look like in October, and will adjust accordingly.