The RTX 3080 Ti is coming soon! NVIDIA announced a four-week delay to the RTX 3080 Ti in an internal post. Originally scheduled for mid-April, its release has now been pushed back to mid-May 2021. This is the fifth time the card's release date has been delayed. In this article, we'll analyze why its release date has been repeatedly postponed, its technical specifications, and the performance tests of this card.
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Why has the release of the RTX 3080 Ti been delayed so many times?
The RTX 3080 Ti will likely be released alongside the RTX 3070 Ti, which is slated for a May 2021 launch. NVIDIA will hold a GTC conference next month, but we know NVIDIA rarely unveils products at these typical conferences. Enthusiasts are therefore waiting for a special event like the "it's almost time" announcement. We still remember this event during the GTX 1080 Ti launch.
Initially, this card was supposed to have 20GB of memory and be released last December, but NVIDIA announced a launch delay with reduced memory of 16GB for January 2021. The company then postponed its release to February. However, the card was not released on the scheduled date. Several modifications were announced: the CUDA cores were reduced to 10240, and the memory was reduced to 12GB. This latest version was therefore planned for release this April but has now been postponed to May.
NVIDIA has not provided any explanation for these delays, but the most obvious cause would be that Ampere is unable to supply sufficient GPUs.
The RTX 3080 Ti will indeed include a GA102-225-KD-A1 chip; however, at Ampere, production of the GA102 and GA104 chips is experiencing significant delays. This delay is not a new phenomenon, as even when the RTX 3080 cards were announced, NVIDIA's partners' retail shelves were emptied just hours before the product launch.
NVIDIA's explanation was that there was unusually high customer demand. As we discussed in our last article, crypto miners were particularly enthusiastic about the RTX 3000 series graphics cards upon their release. According to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves, a very large quantity of 3000 series cards were sold to cryptocurrency miners, representing approximately $175 million in sales to this sector.
Why this craze among crypto-miners for 3000 series cards?
This surge in interest stems from the fact that the Ethereum blockchain will change its operating principles this coming December. The new algorithm will prioritize the test of stake rather than the test of work, effectively eliminating miners. Consequently, miners are exploiting mining to the fullest, down to the last vein, and one of the ways they are doing this is by using NVIDIA 3000 series graphics cards.
Mining would be profitable with a typical RTX 3080 card after 233 days of intensive mining, with an average daily profit of $3. It's worth noting that an RTX 3080 card at its boost clock has a mining speed of 84-89 MH/s.
What are the specifications of this RTX 3080 Ti ?
The Founder's Edition features a PG132-SKU18 PCB with a GA102-225-KD-A1 GPU. This GPU boasts 10,240 CUDA cores, 80 RT cores, and 320 Tensors, built on an 8nm process and containing 28.3 billion transistors. The card will have 12GB of GDDR6X memory running at 19Gbps on a 384-bit memory bus. The bandwidth used is estimated at 912GB/s. The card will reach a boost clock speed of 1.66GHz. In comparison, the Radeon RX 6700 XT reaches a boost clock speed of 2.64GHz. The RTX 3080 Ti has a texture rendering speed of 532.8.
The card measures 313 mm. It connects to the motherboard via its PCIe 4.0 16X 1x 12-pin interface. It has four video connectors, including one HDMI and three DisplayPorts. Regarding 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, it's expected to be 350 Watts. Regarding the price, NVIDIA is likely positioning its Founder's Edition at a similar price point to an AMD RX 6900 XT, around €1000. While the MSRP is therefore €1000, the price could easily double with partners due to the current shortage and the availability of customized models. Let's hope production increases significantly to stabilize the price.
RTX 3080 Ti performance benchmark
Leaked performance tests have shown that the RTX 3080 Ti's performance 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) versus 12,611 (RTX 3090). Furthermore, the Big Hardware Player team also published results from tests performed on an RTX 3080 Ti card (an engineering sample).
This team tested a card in its initial version with 20 GB of memory. The tested RTX 3080 Ti features a GA102 GPU with a memory bandwidth of 760.3 GB/s, which is 176 GB/s less than the RTX 3090. However, significant controversy surrounds the video published by Big Hardware Player. This stems from the fact that the RTX 3080 Ti card is never seen in the video. CPU-Z also recognizes the card as a 20 GB RTX 3080.
But it's clear that the CPU-Z developer hasn't yet updated their software for a card that hasn't been officially released by NVIDIA. In any case, the tests show decent results, as the performance displayed is slightly lower than that of the RTX 3090.
In short, the release date of the RTX 3080 Ti has been repeatedly postponed by NVIDIA due to stock shortages of Ampere GA102 GPUs. The enthusiasm of crypto miners for the 3000 series cards is only making matters worse.
Hopefully this time, the RTX 3080 Ti will finally be released alongside the RTX 3070 Ti in sufficient quantities to avoid frustrating customers who can turn to AMD with the RX 6000 XT which are also all the rage.
