R
ead the room, Nvidia. We’ve just endured nine
months of catastrophic stock shortages, your
GPUs are going for absurd prices on eBay and you
messed up your last attempt to limit mining performance
with an accidental driver release. Was this the best time to
release a new card for over £1,000? Really? We’ll give
you a hint – no.
Not surprisingly, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti sold out soon
after its launch, and the cards are now going for
around £1,700 on eBay. That might be a smaller
markup than we saw the last time around, but
Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate feature, which limits
Ethereum mining performance, clearly isn’t
enough to quell the current swollen demand.
That’s not particularly surprising, given the
pent-up demand from gamers unable to buy
any GPUs for months, as well as supply problems
from the pandemic and silicon manufacturing
woes, but it shows the scale of the problem.
In terms of specs, the RTX 3080 Ti has ‘only’
12GB of memory, compared to 24GB on the
RTX 3090, and it also lacks the flagship’s SLI
support, but it does have plenty of processing
power. The RTX 3080 Ti enables 80 streaming
multiprocessors (SMs) on its GA102 GPU, giving
you 80 corresponding RT processors, 320 Tensor
cores and 10,240 CUDA cores.
Like the RTX 3090, it also has a wide 384-bit
memory interface, giving it a total bandwidth of
912GB/sec with its 1188MHz (19GHz effective) of
GDDR6 memory. Comparatively, the RTX 3090
has 10,496 CUDA cores, while the RTX 3080 has
8,704 – the RTX 3080 Ti is much closer to theREVIEWS / GRAPHICS CARDS
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX
3080 Ti FE /1 ARM + 1 LEG
SUPPLIER ebay.co.uk3090’s spec. The RTX 3090’s 1695MHz boost clock is also
slightly higher than the RTX 3080 Ti’s 1665MHz.Performance
As expected, the RTX 3080 Ti gives you a solid step up in
performance over the RTX 3080, with a smaller difference
(generally under half the size) between the 3080 Ti and the- In Metro Exodus at Ultra settings, the 3080 Ti adds an
extra 14fps to the 3080’s 99th percentile and average frame
rate results at 2,560 x 1,440, and it adds 10fps to the average
at 4K. The 3080 Ti also beats AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT at
those two resolutions (although the latter is a bit quicker at
1,920 x 1,080).
Similarly, in Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra settings, the RTX
3080 Ti beat the Radeon RX 6900 XT, and offered a solid
jump in performance from the RTX 3080. Sadly, this isn’t
enough to make the game properly smoothly playable at 4K,
with an average of 42fps and 99th percentile result of 37fps,
but even the RTX 3090 only adds 3fps to these results.
Where Nvidia still struggles to compete with AMD’s
Radeon RX 6900 XT is in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Here,
the RTX 3080 Ti was soundly beaten by both the Radeon RX
6900 XT and 6800 XT at 2,560 x 1,440, and it was behind
the 6900 XT at 4K.
This game also benefits heavily from enabling Resizable
BAR if you have a motherboard that supports it. This enabled
the RTX 3080 Ti to average 60fps at 4K, although this
was still 7fps off the pace of the Radeon RX 6900 XT with
Resizable BAR enabled. What’s also interesting here is that
the RTX 3080 Ti with Resizable BAR enabled is quicker than
the RTX 3090 in this game, showing that this feature can
make a bigger difference to performance than the number
of CUDA cores and clock speed.
SPEC
Graphics processor
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
Ti, 1365MHz base clock,
1665MHz boost clock
Pipeline
10,240 CUDA cores, 112 ROPS
RT cores
80 (2nd-gen)
Tensor cores
320 (3rd-gen)
Memory
12GB GDDR6X, 1188MHz
(19GHz effective)
Memory interface
384-bit
Card interface
16x PCI-E 4
Memory bandwidth
912GB/sec
Number of slots
2
Power connectors
1 x 12-pin (2 x 8-pin PCI-E
adaptor supplied)
Card length
285mm