Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU could arrive in January to disrupt AMD’s Big Navi sales

Nvidia RTX 3080
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti, the juiced-up version of the vanilla RTX 3080 which is supposedly in the works, could arrive in January 2021 according to the rumor mill.

This latest nugget on the apparent progress of the 3080 Ti comes from Hong Kong-based hardware site HKEPC, which also claims that the price tag will be pitched at around $999 with the GPU competing against AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT.

And of course the beefed up video RAM – which has purportedly been doubled to 20GB, compared to 10GB on the vanilla 3080 – will also help the 3080 Ti look like a better proposition compared to AMD’s Big Navi flagship (which has 16GB of VRAM).

The supposed spec remains the same as we’ve heard in previous rumors, and of course in that speculation, the theory was that Nvidia’s introducing this new variant of the 3080 to hit back at the RX 6800 XT, although as mentioned, HKEPC is suggesting the card is set to go up against the 6900 XT.

We can’t get too carried away with theorizing at this point, of course – indeed, we can’t even be sure the RTX 3080 Ti exists – although if it does, the price point Nvidia pitches it at will of course be crucial in determining how it fares against Big Navi.

As we’ve heard before, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is rumored to have 10,496 CUDA cores, which is the same as the RTX 3090 – but presumably there will be a meaningful differentiation made in their respective performance levels elsewhere.

Part of that could be with the memory, which has not only been reduced from 24GB to 20GB with the purported 3080 Ti, but will also use a lesser bus (320-bit versus 384-bit for the 3090) and have a slower overall bandwidth (760GB/s versus 936GB/s). Treat everything mentioned here with a suitably hefty dose of salt, naturally.

Ti avalanche?

If this new spin on the 3080 Ti graphics card is indeed due in January as this rumor suggests, we should be hearing more on the grapevine about it very shortly you’d imagine.

Meanwhile, we have other potential Ampere Ti variants which could be coming from Nvidia, namely the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards, the latter of which has been particularly strongly rumored. The last we heard about the 3060 Ti is that its release date has supposedly been delayed to December 2, but this should – in theory – be the next GPU we see from Nvidia.

As to whether an RTX 3080 Ti could follow so soon after in January, given Nvidia’s struggles to get stock of current RTX 3000 GPUs on shelves, well, it’s fair enough to say that this seems doubtful, and the rumor mill appears optimistic in its predictions.

As ever, time will tell, but at this point, come January, PC gamers will simply be happy to be able to buy the existing Ampere graphics cards, let alone additional Ti variants…

Via Wccftech

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).