Rumors and leaks about the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti are now coming thick and fast. A big batch of information has apparently appeared on the internet confirming price and specs, along with the anti-cryptomining technology that Nvidia seems to hope will make the GPU less attractive to miners, and therefore more available to gamers.
Chinese website ITHome spills much of the details, which it claims come for sources close to Nvidia. The leak suggests that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will come with a GA102 GPU with 10,240 CUDA cores (slightly lower than the RTX 3090’s 10,496, and much higher than the RTX 3080’s 8,704) and 12GB of GDDR6X memory and a 384-bit memory bus.
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This tallies with rumors we heard a few days ago, which also suggested the RTX 3080 Ti will come with 12GB of memory. If these specs are correct (they are also mentioned in a separate leak reported by the Videocardz website), then the RTX GeForce RTX 3080 Ti looks set to be a formidable graphics card, and its performance may not be too far off the flagship RTX 3090.
The leak Videocardz published also apparently shows the GA102-225-A1 die, which again adds weight to the rumors that the RTX 3080 Ti’s launch is imminent.
Meanwhile, ITHome also suggests the price of the RTX 3080 TI will be ¥7,999 in China, which is around $1,099 / £800 / AU$1,420. If true, that makes it a very expensive GPU, and while no one ever imagined it would be a budget card, it still makes it more expensive than many early rumors had suggested. Still, it’s a fair bit cheaper than the RTX 3090, which has a suggested retail price of $1,499 (£1,399, around AU$2,030) – though due to stock shortages, it is often sold for a lot more.
Stopping miners
While the RTX 3080 Ti’s price seems high, as we’ve seen with the RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 (plus AMD’s new GPUs and CPUs, the PS5 and Xbox Series X and basically any new tech released in the past 12 months) due to scarcity of stock, these already-high prices can quickly skyrocket.
When it comes to GPUs, a lot of this is down to cryptocurrecy miners buying up stock in bulk. Nvidia is apparently attempting to deter miners from buying the RTX 3080 Ti by artificially limiting its mining capabilities – much like it tried to do with the RTX 3060.
By limiting how well the GPU can mine, the hope is that miners won’t buy it, so stock will be more readily available for PC gamers looking to upgrade their rigs.
It’s just as well, as the Videocardz leak also shows off apparent mining performance from an engineering sample of the RTX 3080 Ti without the cryptocurrency limiter enabled.
The results show an ETH mining hash rate of 118.9 Mh/s, which would make the RTX 3080 Ti one of the best graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining in the world. Without that limiter, then, this would be a GPU that would be highly valuable to cryptocurrency miners.
If these results are accurate, then we really hope Nvidia figures out a way to limit the RTX 3080 Ti’s mining performance that can’t be circumnavigated. If it can’t, then the Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti may be yet another GPU that will be almost impossible to buy.
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Via Tom's Hardware
