Leak: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will be available for $ 999 … if you can find
Thanks to several NVIDIA partners, the launch of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti already seems inevitable. Perhaps the strongest evidence comes from a recently leaked photograph of a pallet of MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X OC graphics cards ready to ship from China to the US. Following this leak, data emerged that the suggested retail price (MSRP) would be $ 999.
Obviously, there is almost no chance of purchasing an accelerator using MSRP – at least not shortly. Until now, all GeForce RTX 30 series cards are out of stock. Except for a lucky few who have outpaced reseller bots and miners, the ongoing chip shortage is likely to make the new launch a paperback. Be that as it may, formally, video cards still have such an indicator as MSRP. Here’s how the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti fits into the price hierarchy of modern graphics accelerators in terms of this indicator:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 – $ 1499;
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti – $ 999 (leak);
- AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT – $ 999;
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 – $ 699;
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT – $ 649;
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 – $ 579;
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 – $ 499;
- AMD Radeon RX 6700 – $ 479;
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti – $ 399;
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 – $ 329
Thus, according to rumors, NVIDIA evaluates the card on par with the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. Apparently, the new accelerator will offer better performance for the same money, both in rasterization and real-time ray-traced visuals.
At the same time, NVIDIA runs the risk of cutting the GeForce RTX 3090, although there are two reasons why the company might not worry about this. First, NVIDIA now sells all the GPUs it brings to the market. This is likely to continue throughout 2021, and the manufacturing partner TSMC even suggested that the shortage of chips in general (and not just graphics) could continue into 2022.
Secondly, it looks like NVIDIA has revised the originally intended characteristics of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti so that the performance gap from the GeForce RTX 3090 remains quite significant. According to HKEPC, it was originally planned that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would be essentially a slightly stripped-down version of the GeForce RTX 3090, with the same number of CUDA cores (10,496), almost the same amount of GDDR6X memory (20GB versus 24GB) and that the same memory bus (384 bits). However, it is reported that, in fact, the company does not feel pressure from the Radeon RX 6900 XT and therefore has reduced the technical specifications to 10,240 CUDA cores and 12 GB of GDDR6X memory.
