The souped-up graphics cards from Nvidia were announced on Tuesday as part of the company’s presentation at Computex 2021.
How Well Do the New Nvidia GPUs Perform?
Nvidia describes the RTX 3080 Ti as its “new gaming flagship”. It will see a worldwide release on June 3 2021 and sell for $1,199. This means it will effectively displace the RTX 2080Ti, which was Nvidia’s most powerful gaming graphics card capable of real-time ray tracing when it first launched in 2018. At the same time, the selling price of the RTX 3080 Ti makes it $300 cheaper compared to the RTX 3090. In terms of performance, the RTX 3080 Ti will have 12GB of GDDR6X video memory. This represents a minuscule 2GB VRAM bump over the RTX 3080 that launched last fall for $699. What justifies the huge price discrepancy between the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti is that the latter is less of a more powerful version of the former. It is essentially a slightly weaker version of the much more expensive RTX 3090. On paper, the RTX 3080 Ti sports similar specifications to the RTX 3090, except for having half the VRAM. According to Nvidia, the RTX 3080 Ti will perform at least 50% better compared to the RTX 2080 Ti at 4K resolution and will reportedly be “2x faster in traditional rasterization” compared to 2017’s GTX 1080 Ti. In addition to the RTX 3080 Ti, Nvidia also announced the RTX 3070 Ti. Unlike the RTX 3080 Ti, the RTX 3070 Ti is a more powerful version of the RTX 3070, which launched in Fall 2020. It will reportedly deliver a 50% increase in performance compared to the RTX 2070 Super, which launched in 2019, and will be twice as good as 2017’s GTX 1070 Ti. On paper, the RTX 3070 Ti will have the same amount of VRAM (8GB) as the RTX 3070. The main difference is that it will have a much faster GDDR6X memory instead of just GDDR6. Nvidia expects the RTX 3070 Ti to release and ship worldwide on June 10 for $599, which makes it just $100 more expensive compared to the RTX 3070.
Will the New Nvidia GPUs Help Lower GPU Prices?
As we discussed in an earlier article, graphics card prices are borderline unreasonable right now. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. The chip shortage has only gotten worse and the release of new graphics cards is not expected to make an impact. Thus, you shouldn’t get your hopes up about seeing the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti launch at SRP - that is, if you even get the chance to buy one before cryptocurrency miners snatch them all up despite the added premium. Speaking of cryptocurrency, Nvidia plans on halving the Ethereum mining rate of both the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3070 Ti at launch. Although this is a commendable move, it likely won’t make much of a difference anyway.
