The graphics card market is a bit of a mess at the moment thanks to a combination of bots, crypto-miners and, of course, manufacturing issues related to the global pandemic, but that doesn’t mean Nvidia is going to stop releasing graphics cards, oh no.
In fact, the company announced the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti alongside the 3070 Ti at Computex 2021.
Here’s all there is to know about the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti right now, including availability, pricing and specs.
RTX 3080 Ti in summary
- On sale now
- 12GB GDDR6X memory
- 34 Shader cores, 67 RT cores & 273 Tensor cores
- 1.5x improvement compared to RTX 2080 Ti
- Starts at £1,049/$1,199
- Where to buy the RTX 3080 Ti in the UK
RTX 3070 Ti in summary
- On sale now
- 8GB DDR6X memory
- 22 Shader cores, 42 RT cores & 174 Tensor cores
- 1.5x improvement compared to RTX 2070 SUPER
- Starts at £529/$599
When will the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti be released?
The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti was released worldwide on 3 June 2021, followed by the RTX 3070 Ti a week later on 10 June 2021.
How much do the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti cost?
This is undoubtedly a tough question given the state of the graphics card market at the moment, with limited supply pushing prices up to frankly astronomical levels.
It’s a problem plaguing AMD and Nvidia right now, with the Asus TUF RTX 3080 being sold on Amazon for $1,999 recently – way beyond the $699 MSRP set by Nvidia. What’s worse is the suggestion that the shortage could continue for much of 2021.
Officially, the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti costs the same £1,099/$1,199 as the RTX 2080 Ti, but whether retailers stick to that is another story altogether. There are also third-party variants to consider, which cost more than Nvidia’s MSRP too.
The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti is available from retailers including Overclockers and Currys in the UK and Newegg and Best Buy in the US periodically, but unsurprisingly, it’s very hard to track down right now.
Available from the same online storefronts, the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti is more budget-friendly, coming in with an MSRP of £529/$599. Although, as with the RTX 3080 Ti, prices and availability will vary depending on the retailer.
What does the RTX 3080 Ti offer?
The most interesting talking point among many is the amount of VRAM set to be available in the new high-end 1.67GHz RTX 3080 Ti. While GPU fans have long assumed that the RTX 3080 Ti would come with 20GB of GDDR6X memory, Nvidia revealed it caps out at 12GB instead – the same amount as the RTX 3060.
Of course, it’s the super-fast GDDR6X VRAM instead of the standard GDDR6 RAM from the 3060, but it still doesn’t look great on the surface.
Regardless of how it might look, it’s a 2GB jump compared to the RTX 3080, and Nvidia has also bumped the number of CUDA cores to 10,240 compared to the standard 3080’s 8,704, and there are an increased 67 RT cores & 273 Tensor cores too.
Throw in a 384-bit memory bus with a bandwidth of 912.4GB/s, and you’ve got a graphics card 1.5x more powerful than the last-gen RTX 2080 Ti – and it’s not too far off that of the creative-focused RTX 3090 too.
What does the RTX 3070 Ti offer?
Though it might not be as powerful as the RTX 3080 Ti, the 1.77GHz RTX 3070 Ti is still a capable graphics card that offers a big improvement compared to last year’s RTX 2070 Super, with Nvidia claiming a 1.5x jump in performance between the generations.
That’s thanks to 8GB of GDDR6X memory, which may not be an increase compared to the standard RTX 3070, but there is a boosted 6,144 CUDA cores, 42 RT cores and 174 Tensor cores for improved 1440p performance.
Will you be picking up the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti?
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Author: Lewis Painter, Senior Staff Writer
Lewis Painter is a Senior Staff Writer at Tech Advisor. Our resident Apple expert, Lewis covers everything from iPhone to AirPods, plus a range of smartphones, tablets, laptops and gaming hardware. You'll also find him on the Tech Advisor YouTube channel.