Following AMD's unexpectedly strong reveal of its RX 6000 Series graphics cards on October 28, Nvidia appears to have been rapidly revising its second set of RTX 3000 Series cards to better compete. Several rumors have suggested that both of the upcoming Ti labeled cards, the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti, have been significantly boosted in specification. The latest leak support those rumors, revealing an RTX 3080 Ti that will be surprisingly close to the RTX 3090.
The leak comes from well-known source Kopite7kimi who details what is believed to be a final specification for the enhanced Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti model. It reportedly features the same 10,496 CUDA core count of the $1499 RTX 3090, which is over 20% more than the standard RTX 3080. It also features 20 GB of fast GDDR6X memory, which is double the 10 GB of the RTX 3080, and only 4 GB less than the RTX 3090.
Although the new card will feature significantly more memory than the RTX 3080 it will reportedly run at the same 19 GB per second memory speed, totaling the same 760 GB per second memory bandwidth. The clock speeds for the new card are unknown, but given that the Founders Edition will have the same 320-watt total graphics power as the RTX 3080, it will almost certainly run slower than the 350-watt RTX 3090.
Given the high cost of GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 Ti is likely to be priced at least $200 more than the $699 RTX 3080, and may even be priced to match AMD's RX 6900 XT at $999. Even at the thousand-dollar mark, the new card will almost certainly provide far better performance value than the RTX 3090, particularly if custom board partners can increase the available power wattage. With Nvidia and fabricator Samsung struggling to produce sufficient supply for the existing three RTX 3000 Series cards, it is questionable just how soon it will be able to launch the updated specification, as well as the rumored RTX 3060 Ti.
Some people may wonder why Nvidia didn't simply release this specification of card as the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 in the first place, but then both Nvidia and AMD traditionally leave room for incremental upgrades. On top of which, Nvidia appears to have been as surprised as gamers were by just how significantly AMD increased performance with its RDNA 2 powered RX 6000 Series cards.
With stock of all new graphics cards likely to sell out instantly due to high demand and shortages of GPU chips, and new hardware from both Nvidia and AMD still to be officially announced, it looks like being some time before there is an obvious winner in the new generation graphics card war. The upside though, is that almost all the new cards from both Nvidia and AMD provide better value performance than the previous generation.
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti does not yet have a release date.