Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti: Nvidia’s New Ampere Leader
The story of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti should be familiar ground. Halfway through the normal product cycle, release a better performing the best grapich cards?, better performing variant of the existing x80 series part with a price that makes for a compelling upgrade.
Great Card RTX 3080 Ti
The GTX 1080 was a great card at the time, and the GTX 1080 Ti upped the ante and fundamentally redefined what we expected from a mid-cycle update.
But anything even remotely competitive against our hierarchy of GPU benchmarks, plus all the best graphics cards , are currently misplaced with virtually no retail availability and sky-high prices on sites like eBay. As a result, the RTX 3080 Ti looks much more like the RTX 2080 Ti than the GTX 1080 Ti: fast but expensive.
Whats Change Significant ?
Basically, nothing has changed with the Nvidia Ampere architecture. More and more games support ray tracing and DLSS, and driver improvements over the past nine months have changed performance slightly since launch.
Otherwise, the RTX 3080 Ti uses the same GA102 GPU found in the GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 , disables two more SMs compared to the 3090 and halves the VRAM capacity compared to the 3090. It’s not that big. process in most games, and performance should generally be fairly similar between the two.
Price More Expensive?
The real question will be the retail price and availability, which will no doubt be terrible. Officially, the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition is priced at €1,199 – €300 less than the 3090, but €500 more than the 3080. In practice, the RTX 3080 is already selling for almost €2,000 on eBay, and even in the Newegg Shuffle it regularly goes for over 1,200€.
Meanwhile, the RTX 3090 is closing in on 3000€on eBay and costs over 2,000€in the Newegg Shuffles we’ve been tracking – and your chances of being picked in the Shuffle are extremely low, in our experience.
Here’s a quick look at the specs of the RTX 3080 Ti, as well as similar Nvidia GPUs:
| Graphic card | RTX 3080 Ti |
|---|---|
| Architecture | GA102 |
| Process Technology | Samsung 8N |
| Transistors (Billions) | 28.3 |
| Die Size (mm^2) | 628.4 |
| SM / UC | 80 |
| GPU cores | 10240 |
| Tensor Colors | 320 |
| RT Cores | 80 |
| Base Clock (MHz) | 1370 |
| Clock Boost (MHz) | 1665 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 19 |
| VRAM (GB) | 12 |
| VRAM bus width | 384 |
| ORP | 112 |
| CGU | 320 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) | 34.1 |
| TFLOPS FP16 (Tensor) | 136 (273) |
| RT TFLOPS | 67 |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 912 |
| PDT (WAT) | 350 |
| Release date | June 2021 |
Performance RTX 3080 Ti
In terms of theoretical performance, the RTX 3080 Ti is 3-4% behind the RTX 3090 and 14-20% ahead of the RTX 3080. Memory bandwidth shows the biggest gains, thanks to the addition of two memory channels , although the clocks are slightly lower on the GPU side of things.
Power consumption is rated at 350W, the same as the 3090 and 30W more than the 3080, which could be an issue given that the 3080 Ti Founders Edition uses the same cooler design as the 3080 rather than the three-slot monstrosity that is the 3090 Founders Edition.
Improvement RTX 3080 Ti
When it comes to generational improvements, the RTX 3080 Ti is potentially more than double the compute performance of the 2080 Ti, with almost 50% more memory bandwidth.
In practice, we’d expect performance to be around 40-50% faster than the 2080 Ti, but that’ll mostly be at 4K and 1440p. Buying a GPU like this for 1080p gaming (unless you play games with lots of ray-tracing effects) would be a waste of money.
Conclusion
One last thing to note before continuing is that the RTX 3080 Ti implements Nvidia’s Ethereum hash limiter. The limiter works as expected so far, and we’ve seen average hash rates of 55-65 MHps with the stock settings, depending on the software used.
This is essentially half the performance we expected from the hardware and similar to what we saw with the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 . Hopefully Nvidia doesn’t accidentally bypass its own lock this time, though we expect prices to stay above the official starting point, even with the limiter.