The graphics card market is a bit of a mess at the moment thanks to a combination of bots, crypto-miners and, of course, manufacturing issues related to the global pandemic, but that doesn’t mean Nvidia is going to stop releasing graphics cards, oh no. In fact, if rumours are to be believed, we could be about to see the reveal of the ultimate graphics card aimed at gamers; the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti.
Here’s all there is to know about the RTX 3080 Ti right now, including release date and pricing rumours, and leaked specs too.
When will the RTX 3080 Ti be released?
The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti has been rumoured for months, with initial whispers suggesting it’d be released in October 2020. Of course, that didn’t happen, so when will the new high-end card make an appearance?
The most recent rumours point towards a release on 26 May 2021. The date comes from a Hong Kong-based tech site HKEPC, with sources confident of the late-May launch – and given the fact that multiple versions of the yet-unannounced graphics card have been spotted in the wild, it’s looking likely that we’ll see the RTX 3080 Ti very soon.
Just to confirm from my end – the RTX 3080 Ti 12GB is certainly real, and coming soon™️.
I obviously blacked out the background to protect someone, but that’s a real 3080 Ti someone I know has their hands on… pic.twitter.com/sn18aNbboa
— Moore’s Law Is Dead (@mooreslawisdead)
May 4, 2021
How much will the RTX 3080 Ti cost?
This is undoubtedly a tough question given the state of the graphics card market at the moment, with limited supply pushing prices up to frankly astronomical levels. It’s a problem plaguing AMD and Nvidia right now, with the Asus TUF RTX 3080 being sold on Amazon for $1,999 recently – way beyond the $699 MSRP set by Nvidia. What’s worse is the suggestion that the shortage could continue for much of 2021.
There are claims that aftermarket versions of the card have already gone up for sale, with Reddit user FaisalKhatib sharing images of an MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X at a retailer in Abu Dhabi with an eye-watering price tag of roughly £2500/$3500. It’s hard to verify, so it should be taken with a large pinch of salt, but it highlights the kind of markup high-end graphics cards are seeing right now.
We doubt that’s official pricing though; we imagine the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti will have an MSRP similar to that of its predecessor, the RTX 2080 Ti, which went on sale at around £1,099/£1,199, but whether retailers stick to that is another story altogether. It’s unconfirmed right now, of course, but we may not have long to find out for sure.
What will the RTX 3080 Ti offer?
Nvidia has yet to officially reveal the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, but like with most upcoming products, it has been the subject of plenty of leaks and rumours over the past few months.
The most interesting talking point among many is the supposed amount of VRAM set to be available in the new high-end graphics card. While GPU fans have long assumed that the RTX 3080 Ti would come with 20GB of GDDR6X memory to make the most of the 320-bit memory interface found on the standard RTX 3080, rumours suggest it’ll cap out at just 12GB instead – the same amount as the RTX 3060.
Of course, it’ll likely be the GDDR6X VRAM instead of the standard GDDR6 RAM from the 3060, but it still doesn’t look great on the surface.
Regardless of how it might look, it’s a 2GB jump compared to the RTX 3080, and other rumours suggest that the 3080 Ti will have an increased number of CUDA cores at 10,240 compared to the standard 3080’s 8,704. The former should bring all-round improvements while the latter suggests a focus on improved ray-tracing performance, as expected.
What do you want to see from the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti? Let us know in the comments.
