It’s been one heck of a year in the world of desktop graphics cards. From silicon shortages to cryptocurrency craziness, the average price of a graphics card in 2021 has surged past all expectations, with models both used and new selling for multiples more than the original MSRP, even years after their initial release. But, realities of the current marketplace aside, today we’re here to talk about the objective performance of the latest object of desire for GPU shoppers (and likely newest target for scalpers), the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and how it stacks up against its own (hopefully, one day!) objective MSRP of $1,199.
Let’s start off this graphics card review the same way we’ve started many over the past 12 months: We know you likely will not find the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti at MSRP for the foreseeable future, and those who do manage to get their hands on the card at a fair price likely did so either through a quick trigger finger, the luck of a draw on a GPU lottery, or by fighting fire with fire and employing a card-buying bot of their own.
For those determined many, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a gaming powerhouse almost worth fighting the hordes for. However, its high price point is the only thing that keeps it from true greatness. It’s supposed to be a slightly less powerful, slightly less pricey GeForce RTX 3090 for gamers and creators. But that means it also comes with the same caveat as the original: Even with a lower MSRP from the RTX 3090, the original Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition sets up the RTX 3080 Ti for some seriously out-of-whack price-to-performance ratios.
If price is no issue (and it better not be, if you can’t get your hands on the first wave at MSRP), the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a worthy buy as one of the fastest GPUs in the game today. For the rest of us, the RTX 3080 is almost as good in many 1440p and 4K runs, while costing—at least at MSRP—around 40% less. Now that’s a discount we can get behind in 2021. Of course, you have to find either card first!
RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition Specs: Playing in Elite Company
Straight out of the gate, let’s talk about the $1,199-pound gorilla in the room: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition is, MSRP versus MSRP, more than 70% more expensive than the original GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition at $1,199 to $699. However, glance twice at the specs, and you might start to look at it another way. Despite sharing the same GA102 die and many of the same specs (discounting some slower clocks and lower VRAM), the GTX 3080 Ti is just under 15% less expensive than the RTX 3090 Founders Edition.
With those numbers in mind, let’s see from where Nvidia might have pulled its pricing inspiration…
For starters, as we mentioned, the specs of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti have less in common with the original RTX 3080 than with Nvidia’s top-dog RTX 3090 Founders Edition. When the RTX 3090 Founders Edition first launched, the card seemed stuck between two worlds. On the one hand, content creators at this price level had, for many years, defaulted to Nvidia’s Titan brand of cards, usually stuffed with premium specs and as much VRAM as the technology of the time allowed for, past a certain budget. (Then you would start getting into Nvidia’s Quadro workstation card territory, but no time for that today.)
The gaming crowd, then, looked to the rest of the RTX and GTX lineup for cards that catered to them; think entries like the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1660, or RTX 3080. Until the launch of today’s RTX 3080 Ti, any Nvidia Founders Edition graphics card that called itself “for gamers” was priced under $999 at launch, a ceiling set by the RTX 2080 Ti in September of 2018.
When the RTX 3090 debuted with the rest of the RTX 30 Series late last year, it assumed the de facto mantle of “content creator card,” inherited from the Titan line before it, but not the name. In both power and price, the Titan-esque RTX 3090 lived above the clouds with the other gods of card Olympus at $1,399 MSRP, where it still sits today.
Of course, this is all in the current fairy-tale land of MSRP. Translated to today’s prices via a quick scan of eBay? That “$1,399 suggested price” averages out to a street price of about $3,200, or roughly a 130% increase. Carry that math over to the RTX 3080 Ti, and we’re talking about an RTX 3080 variant that, if trends hold, could shortly be floating right around $2,700 street (depending on whether the scalper stiffs you for shipping, of course).
The point? This is an ill time for Nvidia to raise the floor on what it suggests gamers will spend for cards that have essentially been rebranded as “gaming GPUs that also work for content creation,” and doing away with Titan and its cachet. How bad could it be? Well, we’re afraid to check eBay in the days after this launch, because who knows what the price of the RTX 3080 Ti (or “Titan Junior”) might be once the first wave sells through. (And will that be in minutes, or seconds?)
The Latest Founders Edition Design: Don’t Mess With Success
If you loved the design of previous models in Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series (as we have), you’ll likely be a fan of the RTX 3080 Ti and its effectively identical design, save for some added weight and length. We could gush all over again about how from both a technology and an aesthetic standpoint, the RTX 30 Series Founders Edition cards are artful marvels. It’s a familiar formula: PCBs that have been shrunk by more than 50%, in some cases, according to Nvidia, with the remaining some-odd percentage replaced by more heatsink, attached to the same push-pull fan design we saw when the RTX 30 Series debuted last fall.
The 11.2-inch, double-slot card is smaller compared to some of the crazier third-party RTX 3080 models we’ve tested, such as the 12.3-inch MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10G (which you could also dub, were it a hero sandwich, the “$1,000 footlong”). However, the RTX 3080 Ti is just on the edge of what a strategic compact-PC builder might be able to fit in certain isolated Mini-ITX and MicroATX cases.
Like the iPhone was for smartphones before it, Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series is, at least in my opinion, the game-changer of GPU design going forward. Where other graphics cards can often come off as an exercise in excess (looking at you, Colorful), the RTX 30 Series Founders Edition cards remain a masterclass in restraint.
The idea that Nvidia has found a way to expertly balance the space needed for a PCB against the heatsink, which itself has to offset increased heat from cramped components, is a real feat of engineering. Based on recent efforts, it could be years before AMD, or even Nvidia’s own third-party manufacturing partners, catch up.
The card is, once again, powered by Nvidia’s proprietary 12-pin power connector, which on the RTX 3080 Ti needs two eight-pin power-supply leads to jack into. As for the port selection on the rear plane, the design and the number of available slots remains the same among Founders Edition cards in Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series, with three DisplayPort 1.4b ports alongside a single HDMI 2.1 output, and a lot of backplane ventilation. (That port mix is just enough to keep up with some of Acer’s new monitors slated for release this year.)
Like on the RTX 3080, one port common on last-generation Turing cards is absent: the USB Type-C-lookalike VirtualLink. It’s gone from all the Ampere cards so far, and we suspect, forever. It never caught on with the VR headset makers it was meant to serve. Adios, friend: Pour one out for VirtualLink.
Testing the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition: Sparrin’ With the RTX 3090
So, back to the card on hand. PC Labs ran the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our 2021 PC Labs test rig is Intel-based and employs a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) Z490 motherboard. All cards below were retested on this rig with their latest drivers at launch for an even playing field. Given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs, this rig is the best reasonable configuration of the moment in 2021 to cut the CPU out of the equation for frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our new standard benchmark regimen, which tests a card’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress the card in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest possible quality preset or settings. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and you’re worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but many of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) have both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling integrated directly into the game. This can mean boosts of up to 40% more performance on top, depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other two resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our mix of AAA titles includes a mix of recent AAA titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and F1 2020, as well as some older-but-still-reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL’s circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score, to isolate the card performance. Meanwhile, we also ran 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme test, which is a good test of how well a card will do specifically in DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. Finally, there’s Port Royal, which is strictly a test for RTX cards right now, measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. (Thus why blank results for the AMD cards on that one.) Also here are a handful of GPU-acceleration tests (Furmark, LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link above.
As a “discount” RTX 3090 with half the available VRAM on board, synthetic testing is the first stop to show what kind of difference you can expect in rendering tasks between the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3090.
Here the results showcase the RTX 3080 Ti, in rendering, as a price-to-performance winner over the RTX 3090. We don’t run the most extreme gamut of 3D rendering tasks that the RTX 3090 and Titan variants are more famous for crunching through; however, the margins of difference in LuxMark results between the two show the RTX 3080 Ti as an impressive RTX 3090 alternative for roughly 15% less.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games
Now, on to the real-world gaming stuff. The following benchmarks are games that you can play. We typically used in each case (for these AAA games) the highest in-game preset and, if available, DirectX 12. The multiplayer-focused and esports titles (such as CS:GO and Rainbow Six) coming up in the next chart group were set slightly below top detail settings to maximize frame rates. We’ll talk more about them there.
If the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is the perfect 4K gamers’ card (and in our opinion, it is), the RTX 3090 holds a more specialized crown: best…or, really, only card for so-called “8K gamers.”
We don’t test at 8K yet (the monitors barely exist, the game support is hardly baked), so we can’t say for sure if the RTX 3080 Ti is the world’s best value for 8K gaming. But from our results in 4K, we can easily see that it’s overpriced if it’ll serve just as a 4K gaming engine alone.
The results of these gaming runs cement the identity of the RTX 3080 Ti as a down-spec RTX 3090 in disguise. The power is obviously there; however, the rubber meets the road on just how much more powerful the RTX 3080 Ti is versus the original RTX 3080. Note: On the AMD Radeon side, we haven’t had an opportunity to test a Radeon RX 6900 XT for ourselves (stock of that card is scarce all around). However, the Radeon RX 6800 XT, as a near-equal to the RTX 3080 depending on the game, falls under the same category as an, ahem, relative “value pick” versus the RTX 3080 Ti.
There will always be diminishing returns on value the higher you go in a respective GPU stack. However, at such a vast price difference taken against an average of just 14% more performance in 4K gaming, the value proposition for the RTX 3080 Ti would be tough to justify even with scalpers and GPU bots out of the picture. This is made clearer thanks to overclocked third-party GeForce RTX 3080 card versions like the MSI Gaming X Trio 10G mentioned earlier. While retailing just above the RTX 3080 Founders Edition at a $759 MSRP, it comes within just a few frames of the RTX 3080 Ti in 4K, narrowing the value proposition further still.
However, the RTX 3080 Ti so regularly matches up with the RTX 3090 in these same tests (a top-of-the-top overclocked RTX 3090, no less), that it simply resembles a better RTX 3090 for 4K gaming…but no one should be buying an RTX 3090 for current-day gaming, right?
Testing Results: Multiplayer Games
Though most of PC Labs’ game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we’ve kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Final Fantasy XIV tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep frame rates for 1080p games above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s a coveted target for highly competitive esports gamers who have high-refresh-rate 144Hz or 165Hz gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz monitors, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips under 60fps, is fine. Then again, we are talking about a $1,000-plus card here, so…
As an exercise in charity for the people, I should, in good faith, ask you to skip this section entirely. If you’re considering buying up what limited RTX 3080 Ti stock there is to play games like Counter-Strike Global Offensive…might I interest you in an equally-impressive Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super instead? It cleanly blows out any 360Hz monitors on shelves in 1080p and hits well above 240Hz in 1440p. Not only that, it also has the added bonus of not being a state-of-the-art card used to play a 20-year-old game!
Testing Results: Legacy AAA Titles
Speaking of “way, way more than enough horsepower,” let’s see how the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition does against some AAA games that have long since passed their prime as the most graphically demanding titles on shelves. We ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Tomb Raider (2013), the original Sleeping Dogs, and Bioshock: Infinite, the last being a game that has no business still being as well optimized as it is here in 2021.
Do we even need to say it? It’s a blowout. This is another of those “So, how much does it win by?” scenarios, rather than whether or not it wins at all.
And again, just for the preservation of what video-card stock there is out there, we’ll repeat the request from above: Please don’t buy an RTX 3080 Ti (or an RTX 3090, for that matter) just to play Sleeping Dogs at a higher refresh rate than the developers could have ever dreamed of. We beg of you!
Overclocking and Thermals: Almost as Cool as It Looks
We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, and the card peaked at a temperature of 81 degrees C. That’s a bit hotter than the RTX 3080 Founders Edition at 77 degrees C, and shows that as the RTX Founders Edition family scales and grows, temps grow along with it.
Like in our RTX 3080 Founders Edition review, and in our FLIR One Pro thermal-camera evaluation, much of the waste heat looks to be collecting in the middle of the card, rather than in an even dispersion across its length. The Founders Edition cards have been nothing if not consistent in this regard. Go ahead, head back through some of our Founders Edition reviews and check the photos for yourself!
Seeing such stable thermals gave us the confidence to see what kind of overclock we could get out of the card using the EVGA Precision X1 utility. After some tuning, I was able to achieve a stable clock of 1,915MHz, 225MHz over the baseline, which brings it just over the boost clocks of the RTX 3090 and translated to around a 5% bump in benchmark results. Founders Edition cards are known for their overclocking stubbornness, so it’s nice to see anything at all in this department, let alone a perceptible gain like that. Well played, Nvidia.
Verdict: The Most Muscled-Up Middle Child Ever
A card this small, light, quiet, and cool has no business looking as good as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition does. Nvidia is, once again, sitting pretty not only versus AMD, but also against any third-party manufacturer that produces its own RTX 3080 Ti models in tandem this launch. The company’s Founders Edition cards are engineered beyond what any other card maker seems capable of these days, and the RTX 3080 Ti is yet another near-flawless example of Nvidia’s technological dominance in the space.
But that precision comes at a price. Oh, the price: The MSRP, and then whatever mangling the current market may wreak on it. The RTX 3080 Ti may be beautiful on the outside, and a 4K-gaming beast inside, but it doesn’t generate quite enough extra performance over the non-Ti RTX 3080 to justify the big increase in MSRP. How that plays out in real world pricing is anyone’s guess, but we don’t expect the price proportions to be any prettier in its favor.
Think of it this way: In the current supply-squeezed ecosystem, cards are averaging between 1.25 times and 4 times their retail price on some open marketplaces. Hundreds of dollars added to the MSRP of a card—like, say, $500 between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti—ends up inflated by that multiple, putting the cards even further out of reach for your average buyer than they already were before. And further from each other in absolute price, as well.
The GPU market of today—June 2nd, 2021—doesn’t have tolerances for gaps like that. If you’re buying an RTX 3090 or an RTX 3080 Ti, you should really love creating and gaming. But if you’re just on the hunt for a gaming card that powers games in 1440p and 4K at a superhero level, the RTX 3080 (despite what eBay might say) is still objectively the better deal.
That said, with crypto prices falling by the minute at this writing, it may not be long before a wave of used RTX 30 Series GPUs hits the secondhand marketplace. Soon after, we could see a stabilization of prices for newer GPUs like the RTX 3080 Ti, in which case it may be only a few months before you’re able to get your hands on an RTX 3080 Ti at the $1,199 price point that Nvidia is suggesting to retailers at launch. (That would make it a steal vs. the current RTX 3080 street price of $1,399, but presumably the RTX 3080 would drop proportionally, too.)
The RTX 3080 Ti isn’t a bad graphics card by any stretch, far from it. It’s a wild beast of a 4K card. It’s just that the RTX 3080 is a really great one, especially at the price at which it first launched. If the card market stabilizes in 2021, a $699 version of an RTX 3080 will still be the best thing to happen to 4K gaming yet, perhaps surpassed in certain situations only by the equally stellar GeForce RTX 3070.
The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti isn’t a faster RTX 3080; it’s a slower RTX 3090. As an $1,199 card, the RTX 3080 Ti is a discounted RTX 3090 that, like that card and the Titans before it, should only be seriously considered by content creators and Powerball winners. As such, it deftly wiggles itself into a niche slot for budget-focused content creators who might be able to take the VRAM and clock-speed hit without losing anything visible in their render times. But for gamers, the RTX 3080 (and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, for that matter) are both worthy-enough 4K players to remain the premier options for 4K gamers headed into the second half of this, the craziest of all GPU years.
