Rumours coming out of China suggest we will see Nvidia launch the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in April. The story was picked up by Twitter's momomo_us, and the source appears to be very confident that the new high-end Ampere graphics card will "be released on the market around mid-April".
Rumours about the release on an RTX 3080 Ti have swirled for rather a long time. It appears to be the case that Nvidia and partners have pencilled in a date to launch this GPU at least twice previously, before deciding to delay, and may have reconfigured the key specs (particularly VRAM quota). In December last year HEXUS published three stories on the yet to be revealed GPU, as Asus accidentally listed this card in its support pages and Gigabyte registered models with the EEC. Furthermore, usually reliable sources tipped that the card had been delayed to at least Feb 2021. Coming up to date, a week ago we reported on various sources indicating the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would apply Nvidia's mining limiter strategy. (On a side note, some reports this week saying that the Nvidia cryptomining limiter had been bypassed proved to be wrong).
Looking at the previous rumours and leaks, the weight of opinion seems to be behind the upcoming RTX 3080 TI coming with 20GB of VRAM – just 4GB less than the RTX 3090. That is how Asus support listed it – in one of the clearer cut leaks from December. However, there is speculation now suggesting that this graphics card could be equipped with 12GB of VRAM, like the recently launched GTX 3060, which is still 2GB better than the RTX 3080.
Nvidia's problem with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is that it doesn't want to kill its much more expensive RTX 3090 ($1,499 RRP) with its RTX 3080 Ti (expected $999). But the performance difference between the RTX 3090 and 3080 ($699 RRP) is already rather small.
The most recent HEXUS review of a GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card was of an MSI Gaming X Trio model – just in case you want a refresher of how the RTX 3090 compares to GPUs like the RTX 3080. However, more recent reviews, like our test of the Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT Toxic, put AMD's more recently launched RDNA 2 challengers in the mix.
