Nvidia’s 3080 Ti is a ludicrously expensive disappointment

Nvidia has a bit of a habit releasing GPU revisions periodically to stay on top of the competition. These are usually just existing cards that have the clocks dialed up a bit. We saw this with last generation Turing cards, when the company surprisingly sprang their “Super” line on us, conveniently right after AMD releases its first batch of RDNA1 chips. Following through on this strategy, Nvidia has just announced the GeForce RTX 3080Ti, which may possibly be their most disappointing GPU release in ages.

Now, on paper we have something fairly respectable here. 10,240 CUDA cores running at 1.67 GHz, pumping out a theoretical 34.1 TFLOPS of raw power. We also get 12GB of 19Gbps GDDR6 memory running on 384-bit bus. This puts it tantalizingly close to the current cock of the walk, the GeForce 3090. Nvidia also claims it will outperform rival AMD’s 6900XT across the board. Except, benchmarks tell a bit of a different story.

Gamers Nexus ran their usual suite of tests on the card and discovered that the 3080Ti performs about halfway between a 3090 and vanilla 3080. Which is certainly to be expected. But the gap between the three is relatively small as is. We’re talking in the ballpark of 10fps for a trio of cards that will regularly push upwards of 100fps at 4K in most current games. At those speeds, those ten extra frames aren’t going to provide a noticeable difference for most people. The gap narrows considerably at 1440p and 1080p resolutions, with each card basically being six and half a dozen of each other. GN was also able to dispel Nvidia’s claims that the 3080 Ti outperforms the Radeon 6900XT, with the AMD card regularly trading blows with it, or outright outperforming it by a wide margin in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2. While Nvidia still holds the performance crown here, the red team is certainly nipping at their heels.

Overall, the 3080 Ti is a fairly respectable card. The problem is the pricing. Nvidia is listing it for a butt puckering MSRP of $1200. Which makes it a bargain over the 3090, but considerably more expensive than the $699 vanilla 3080. As we’ve seen from the benchmarks, the gap between the Ti and its little brother isn’t anywhere wide enough to justify a $500 price difference. In fact, it makes the 72% hike from the 1080 Ti to the 2080 Ti seem almost reasonable. I suppose it is cheaper than the $1400 RTX 3090, but the numbers here give a clear win to the vanilla 3080. Of course pricing is way of whack across pretty much every GPU right now. Really putting the “suggested” in Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price. No matter how much these cards cost, they’ll sell out, and Nvidia knows it. That’s why they’ve priced this card so much higher than the next product down the stack, despite the small performance increase.

Now where this card is going to excel is workstation applications that benefit from lots of fast VRAM. But if you’re a gamer, you’re probably best to leave this one to the miners.