Nvidia’s at this point strongly rumored GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, which may be launched imminently at Computex alongside a 3070 Ti, could come very close to the performance of the top dog RTX 3090 graphics card.
So close it’s pretty much a dead heat, or at least that’s the suggestion going by a leaked benchmark pointed out by VideoCardz; though there are some caveats around that result, aside from the obvious danger of it being faked.
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The Geekbench result in question for the purported RTX 3080 Ti shows the GPU hitting 238,603 points in the CUDA benchmark, a score which lies pretty much smack bang between the two averages posted for RTX 3090 models (under slightly different names), which are 239,003 and 236,941 respectively.
Hence viewing those results in isolation, you could draw the conclusion that the incoming RTX 3080 Ti might be just about as quick as the flagship RTX 3090, give or take a tiny (inconsequential) amount.
We need to be very careful here, though, not just because this is a leaked result, but also because it’s just one benchmark. And more to the point, it’s Geekbench’s GPU benchmark: not one commonly cited or used to compare graphics cards. It’d be a more convincing state of affairs if we were seeing leaked 3DMark results, for example.
That said, Geekbench’s CUDA benchmark is still an avenue of comparison between Nvidia GPUs, and the result may raise a few eyebrows here and there.
Of course, when you think about it, powering up the RTX 3080 was always going to make a GPU that comes somewhat close to the RTX 3090; as the 3080 itself isn’t all that far off in the first place. It's roughly 10% to 20% off, as we observed in our 3090 review, so averaging at about 15% or so – with the turbocharged 3080 Ti version clearly going to close that gap down a good bit.
Stacking up the specs
The benchmark shows that the RTX 3080 Ti spec is 10,240 CUDA cores – not far off the RTX 3090’s 10,496, and way ahead of the vanilla 3080’s 8,704 cores – and it has a 384-bit memory bus (same as the 3090) with a very similar memory bandwidth too. It looks like the biggest difference is set to be the 12GB of GDDR6X video memory on the 3080 Ti versus the 24GB the 3090 bristles with.
Might this new Ti graphics card look a bit too close to the 3090 for comfort, then, from Nvidia’s perspective? Well, there’s certainly an element of that, but really these are (at least supposed) to be two different cards for different audiences: gamers (the 3080 Ti will purportedly have that mining hash rate limiter as well) and those playing with heavyweight applications who might really need that 24GB of VRAM.
The rumored specs may be wrong of course, and other benchmarks or real-world usage may prove to throw a different light on this comparison than a Geekbench result, but it’s certainly going to be interesting to see how the RTX 3080 Ti pans out – hopefully in a very short matter of time.
Pricing will be another issue, of course, and this fresh info could be a hint of a higher than anticipated price tag – and that’s before you’re looking at buying off a scalper because stock has vanished instantly.
