NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Reportedly Launching in January 2021, Will Feature 20 GB GDDR6X Memory & Tackle AMD RX 6900 XT

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is reportedly launching as early as January 2021 to tackle AMD's flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. According to HKEPC, the card will get a huge specifications boost as was reported a few days ago and feature more memory and a very competitive price against AMD's $999 graphics card.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is designed to tackle AMD's flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. This means that the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 will continue to exist to tackle the RX 6800 series graphics cards. There are rumors of an RTX 3070 Ti variant too which will compete with the RX 6800 (non-XT) but the RTX 3080 should be positioned comfortably with the RX 6800 XT albeit with lower memory size.

Just a few months after, it looks like NVIDIA has finally decided the specifications of its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. Details from Kopite7kimi suggest that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE (Founders Edition) graphics card will feature the PG133-SKU15 PCB design and the GA102-250-KD-A1 graphics core.

The specifications for the GA102-250 GPU have also changed since the last time we saw them and are now exactly the same as the GeForce RTX 3090 at 10496 FP32 CUDA cores. This means that we are essentially looking at RTX 3090 performance at a lower price point. There's a possibility that some select blocks could be disabled for the GA102-250 GPU and the card would almost certainly run at lower clock speeds but that remains to be seen.

As for memory, the card will feature 20 GB of GDDR6X memory. Unlike the 19.5 Gbps speeds of the RTX 3090, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is said to retain the same memory speeds as the RTX 3080 at 19 Gbps. Since we are getting a 20 GB bus interface, NVIDIA will be using a 320-bit bus interface which equals a total bandwidth of 760 GB/s. TGP for the card is set to be the same as the RTX 3080 at 320 Watts. That's definitely needed to feed the extra cores so NVIDIA might have to optimize the clocks a bit here.

In terms of performance, we can expect the card to tackle the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT but we do not know if NVIDIA plans to offer the RTX 3080 Ti at a higher price point than the RTX 3080 or reduce prices on their existing RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 cards to match the competition. I believe the price cuts won't be happening soon since NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series supply is being sold as soon as it ships out of the factory to the retail segment.

The RTX 3080 Ti could hit a price around $899-$999 US which would be $249 US higher than the RX 6800 XT at the very least. We also know that the GeForce RTX 3090 is around 10-15% faster than the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti is also expected to fall within the same range. This mostly looks like a repeat of the GeForce GTX 780 and Radeon R9 290X days where the 780 failed to impress us against the competition and NVIDIA had to go all the way to release the GeForce GTX 780 Ti to undo the damage done by the R9 290X.