If you’ve been struggling to buy a high-end graphics card recently, it may have been a blessing in disguise. That’s because Nvidia just set the performance bar higher with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, both of which promise to offer big performance gains over what has come before.
The RTX 3080 Ti is set to release worldwide on June 3 for $1,119. In terms of performance, Nvidia claims it’s 2x faster than a GTX 1080 Ti for traditional rasterization, as well as the performance benefits the card offers for ray tracing. The RTX 3070 Ti is significantly cheaper at $599 and will be released on June 10. It’s 1.5x faster than an RTX 2070 Super and doubles the frame rate compared to the GTX 1070 Ti.
Nvidia has bumped the spec of the RTX 3080 Ti considerably compared to the existing RTX 3080, increasing the CUDA cores count to 10,240, the on-board memory to 12GB, and the memory interface to 384-bit. The RTX 3080 has 8,704 cores, 10GB of memory, and a 320-bit memory interface. Clock speeds are lower, though, with the RTX 3080 Ti running at 1.37GHz and boosting to 1.67GHz, where as the RTX 3080 runs at 1.44GHz boosting to 1.71GHz. The other big difference between these two cards you can’t fail to notice is the price point. The RTX 3080 is $699, so you’re paying an extra $500 for this extra performance.
It’s a different situation with the RTX 3070 Ti, which has 6,144 CUDA cores compared to the RTX 3070′s 5,888 cores. However, it retains the same 8GB of memory and 256-bit memory interface. Clock speeds are higher at 1.58GHz boosting to 1.77GHz. The $599 price point makes it $100 more expensive than the RTX 3070, and therefore an much easier choice to make than selecting between a 3080 and 3080 Ti.
For both Ti cards, we can expect overclocked versions to appear from multiple manufacturers. We’ll find out just how capable these new cards are in the coming days when the first reviews start to appear, but it seems unlikely this will ease the pressure on the supply chain and make purchasing a graphics card any easier. Scalpers with healthy stocks of RTX 3080 and 3070 cards may now attempt to offload them quickly, though.
