NVIDIA today is releasing the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Announced earlier for COMPUTEX, rumors have already popped up about the card’s release prior but that ends today as we have the official card in hand. The GeForce RTX 3060 launch was our most recent coverage for NVIDIA and that was a partner launch with no Founders Edition card. Given the numerous teases from AICs, I was under the impression that this launch would also be a partner-first one but that is false.
Today we have the NVIDA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition: featuring this generation’s industrial-style blow-through cooler from NVIDIA, it features a lot of similarities with the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition including a similarly-sized cooler. This comes at a surprise as this card is a slightly cutdown version of the RTX 3090, NVIDIA’s most powerful card this generation and that card features an extremely beefy cooler. This also leads us to how NVIDIA is billing the RTX 3080 Ti: the New Gaming Flagship. And let me spoil things for you already: its not. But its also not that simple. We’ll talk about that later on this article.
In this review, we’ll detail the gaming performance of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Read on!
About the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a big leap from the RTX 2080 Ti and given that its rooted mainly in the RTX 3090 which is a Titan-class GPU, its not surprising, the comparison isn’t even close. With the RTX 30 series already doubling much of the CUDA cores from their Turing counterparts, we’ve already seen just how large that results in performance can be just because of that. But the the most glaring criticism about the RTX 3080 Ti is its VRAM count and actual feasibility. This is something I’m looking to resolve in this review. Is the RTX 3080 Ti better than an RTX 3090 in gaming? we’ll find out.
But first, let’s get specs out of the way. As a note, NVIDIA’s RTX 30 Founders Edition cards are not reference cards. We’ve already discussed this in detail in our NVIDIA RTX 3080 Founders Edition Review way back in September of 2020. You can check out that review if you’re interested in finding out more about NVIDIA’s new RTX 30 series cooler. The RTX 3080 Ti features 10240 CUDA cores and has a boost clock of up to 1665Mhz. Its equipped with 12GB GDDR6X of video memory and they are wired to a 384-bit memory interface which gives the card a 912GB/s bandwidth. Lastly, the RTX 3080 Ti is rated at 350 watts which should have partners equipping with two PCIe power connector. NVIDIA’s Founders Edition card uses MicroFit to 2x-PCIe 8-pin power.
The cooler design is similar to the RTX 3080 FE which features a blowthrough cooler on one-end and another fan blowing over the PCB over the heatsink. No other major changes is done to the cooler.
