The release of the RTX 3080 Ti will be coming soon! NVIDIA announced a 4-week RTX 3080 Ti Scheduled for mid-April, its release has been postponed to mid-May 2021. This is the fifth time that the release date of this card has been postponed. In this article, we will analyze why its release date is repeatedly postponed, what are its technical characteristics and what about the performance tests of this card.
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Why is the release of the RTX 3080 Ti postponed many times?
RTX 3080 Ti card will normally be released alongside the RTX 3070 Ti which is scheduled for a May 2021 release date. NVIDIA will be holding a GTC conference next month, but we know that NVIDIA never releases products at these typical conferences. Enthusiasts are therefore waiting for a special event like “it's almost TIme”. We still remember this event when the GTX 1080 Ti was released.
Initially, this card was to have 20 GB of memory and was to be released last December, but NVIDIA announced a postponement of the launch with memory reduced to 16 GB for the month of January 2021. The firm postponed its release to February. But the card was not released on the scheduled date. Various modifications have been announced: the CUDA cores have been reduced to 10240 and the memory will only have 12 GB. This latest version was therefore planned to be released this month of April but it was finally postponed to May.
No explanation has been provided by NVIDIA regarding these postponements, but the most obvious cause would be the fact that Ampere cannot supply sufficient GPUs.
The RTX 3080 Ti will indeed include a GA102-225-KD-A1; while at Ampere, the production of GA102 and GA104 is experiencing huge delays. This delay is not a new thing because even when the release of RTX 3080 cards was announced, the sales shelves of NVIDIA partners were emptied just a few hours before the launch of this product.
The explanation provided by NVIDIA was that there was unusual high demand from customers. We talked in fact in our last article about the enthusiasm of crypto-miners for the RTX 3000 series graphics cards when they were released. According to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves, a very large quantity of 3000 series cards have been sold to cryptocurrency miners. That is, a sale of around $175 million attributable to this sector of activity.
Why this enthusiasm among crypto-miners for series 3000 cards?
This enthusiasm comes from the fact that the Ethereum blockchain will change its operation next December. The new algorithm will favor the challenge test and no longer the work test. Which will put the minors out of the game. As a result, miners are fully exploiting mining down to the last vein and one of the ways to achieve this is to use NVIDIA 3000 series cards.
Mining would be profitable with a typical RTX 3080 card after 233 days of intensive mining with an average profitability of $3 per day. It should be noted that an RTX 3080 boost clock card has a mining speed of 84-89 MH/s.
What are the configurations of this RTX 3080 Ti ?
The Founder Edition features a PG132-SKU18 PCB with a GA102-225-KD-A1 GPU. The GPU has 10,240 CUDA cores, 80 RT cores and 320 Tensors with 8nm engraving technology and has 28.3 billion transistors. This card will have 12 GB of GDDR6X running at 19 Gbps on a 384-bit memory bus. The bandwidth used would be 912 GB/s. The card will reach a frequency of 1.66 GHz in boost clock mode. The Radeon RX 6700 XT compared to it reaches a frequency of 2.64 GHz. The texturing speed of the RTX 3080 Ti is 532.8.
The card measures 313mm. It is connected to the motherboard via its PCIe 4.0 16X 1x 12 pin interface. It has 4 video connectors including 1 HDMI and 3 Display ports. As for the supported APIs, the RTX 3080 Ti supports DirectX Ultimate (12.2), Open GPL 4.6, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.2 and CUDA 8.6.
As for the TDP power, it would be 350 Watts. Regarding the price, NVIDIA is probably positioned at the height of the price of an AMD RX 6900 XT card for its Founder Edition card, i.e. at €1000. If the MSRP price would therefore be €1000, the price can easily double among partners in the face of the current shortage and with customized models. Let's hope that production will be more substantial to stabilize the price as best as possible.
RTX 3080 Ti performance benchmark
Leaked benchmarks have shown that the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti is close to that of the RTX 3090: FS at 40,606 (RTX 3080 Ti) versus 43,998 (RTX 3090), TS at 18,723 (RTX 3080 Ti) versus 19,095 (RTX 3090), PR at 12,398 (RTX 3080 Ti) against 12,611 (RTX 3090). In addition, the Big Hardware Player team also publishes results following tests carried out on an RTX 3080 Ti card (An engineering sample).
This team tested a card in the initial version containing 20 GB of memory. The RTX 3080 Ti tested features a GA102 GPU with a memory bandwidth of 760.3 GB/s, or -176 GB/s of the RTX 3090. However, big controversies revolve around the video published by Big Hardware Player. They come from the fact that the RTX 3080 Ti card is never seen in the video. CPU-Z also recognizes the card as an RTX 3080 20 GB.
But it's obvious that the CPU-Z developer hasn't yet updated its software for a card that hasn't yet been officially released by NVIDIA. Regardless, the tests show decent results because the performance shown is slightly lower than that of the RTX 3090.
In short, the release date of the RTX 3080 Ti card has been postponed many times by NVIDIA following a stock shortage of the Ampere GA102 GPUs. The craze of crypto-miners for 3000 series cards does not help matters.
Hopefully this time around, the RTX 3080 Ti will finally be released alongside the RTX 3070 Ti in sufficient quantity to not frustrate customers who may turn to AMD with the RX 6000 XT which are also all the rage.
