While they almost certainly won’t solve the shortage of graphics cards on their own, today Nvidia announced two new members of the RTX 30-series family with its new 3080 Ti and 3070 TI GPUs.
Slotting in on either side of the existing RTX 3080 (which carries a $700 MSRP), the new RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti will be available for $1,200 and $600, respectively. However, between its price and its specs, the new 3080 Ti actually has more in common with Nvidia’s super-premium RTX 3090 than it does with the standard 3080, which positions the 3080 Ti as the true new flagship GPU for high-end gaming.
Compared to the RTX 3090 which sports 82 streaming multiprocessors, 82 RT cores, and a boost clock of 1.695 GHz, the 3080 Ti features just two fewer streaming multiprocessors, two fewer RT cores, and a barely lower boost clock of 1.665 GHz, with both GPUs sporting the exact same 350-watt TDP. The biggest difference between Nvidia’s top two consumer GPUs is that the 3080 Ti only features 12GB of vRAM versus the 24GB of vRAM you get in the 3090. However, considering the 3090 costs $300 more than 3080 Ti at a cool $1,500, anything to bring down the price of Nvidia’s top-tier gaming GPU is a welcome change.
On the other hand, while the 3070 Ti’s $600 price tag is much more appealing compared to the 3080 Ti, the lower-end card only offers some minor upgrades compared to the vanilla 3070, due in large part to both cards being based on Nvidia’s GA104 chip. Both the 3070 and 3070 Ti feature the same 8GB of vRAM, with the 3070 Ti getting just two more streaming multiprocessors, two more RT cores, and six more Tensor cores.
That said, the upgrade from GDDR6 to faster GDDR6x memory could result in a nice boost in performance, though we’ll have to wait until we can test them out ourselves to confirm. Regardless, for anyone still using a graphics card from a previous generation, with Nvidia claiming that the 3070 Ti delivers 1.5x better performance than the 2070 Super, and 2x better performance than the 1070 Ti, the 3070 Ti may still end up being a good upgrade target for gamers with a more down-to-earth budget.
Additionally, to help make the new 3080 Ti and 3070 less appealing to crypto miners, Nvidia has also limited the Ethereum hash rate on both cards, so hopefully, gamers can actually buy and use Nvidia’s new GPUs for their intended purpose.
As usual, the 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti will be available directly from Nvidia as limited-time Founders Edition cards, with pre-orders for the 3080 Ti arriving first on June 3, followed shortly after by the 3070 Ti on June 10, with all the various partner cards from companies like Asus, MSI, EVGA and others expected to land throughout the summer.