Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti FE Review

Introduction

Such has been the supply issues caused by the Covid restrictions around the world, as well as unexpectedly high demand, that many people are still waiting patiently for the original Ampere GPUs to appear in retailers, and here we are with a brand new card in the form of the RTX 3080 Ti.

Any Nvidia card is nearly always quickly accompanied by a Ti or Super sequel, and normally this wouldn't be something that leaves a slightly odd taste in our mouths, but when you couple this new release with the scarcity of the regular card we are left wondering who exactly this card is for. If you were lucky enough to snaffle a RTX 3080 then you'll be annoyed at it already being out of date, and if you weren't then we're pretty sure that the Ti will come with a suitable price hike so you're having to save even harder to try and get your hands on a new GPU. It makes perfect business sense for Nvidia of course, and indeed further down the line when retailers shelves are totally bare, but right now it's a sticky situation.

However, let's leave politics aside for a moment and focus upon exactly what the Ti version of the RTX 3080 is bringing to the party. Like many Ti models in the past it's a halfway house between the card it is the sequel to, and the next one up in the model chain, in this case the RTX 3090. Without giving the game away too much this is a lot closer to the RTX 3090 than we were expecting it to be, as there isn't just a tiny improvement to the hardware but a fairly substantial one in every department.

Technical Specifications

The primary differences between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti are to be found in all the important places. The Ti has 12 extra Shader Modules which give 48 extra Tensor Cores, 12 extra RT Cores, and 1536 more CUDA Cores. In case that doesn't feel like enough the Texture Unit quota has been upped from 272 to 320, whilst you have another 16 ROPs to play with too. Video Memory has been increased from 10GB to 12GB and it's now at 384-bit instead of 320, which brings the bandwidth up from 760 GB/s to 912 GB/. All in all it's a total improvement from the RTX 3080 that's so popular.