Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti & 3070 Ti
Ampere’s mid-life refresh hits the shelves – in a manner of speaking.
Ampere’s mid life refresh hits the shelves – in a manner of speaking.
As gamers ourselves, we love it when new graphics cards hit our labs. But as has been the case with launches over the past year, we have to begin with a lament about the sad state of the PC market. GPUs continue to sell at inflated prices and stocks continue to be scarce. It’s a problem that’s affecting the wider semiconductor market too, but when you add the double whammy of crypto mining demand, the result is ridiculous pricing at levels well above RRPs. But, there’s hope! The RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti both introduce a hash rate limiter that reduces their appeal to miners. We really hope that this leads to more cards in the hands of gamers at reasonable prices. Anyway, enough about all that. Let’s take a look at the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti!
Under the hood
The RTX 3080 Ti makes use of the same GA102 GPU as the 3080, but with extra cores unlocked. There’s also a wider memory bus that allows Nvidia to equip the card with 12GB of memory. In short, the 3080, 3080 Ti and 3090 contain 8,704, 10,240 and 10,496 cores respectively. Arguably the bigger changes are with regards to the memory subsystem. The 3080, 3080 Ti and 3090 have 10GB over 320-bit, 12GB over 384-bit and 24Gb over 384-bit respectively. As you can see, this places the 3080 Ti much closer to the 3090 in spec than it is to the 3080.
The RTX 3070 Ti makes use of the GA104 GPU, which is shared with the 3070 and 3060 Ti. The 3070 Ti uses the full capabilities of the chip, with all cores unlocked. The 6,144 cores of the 3070 Ti compares to the 5,888 of the 3070 and 4,864 of the 3060 Ti. The 3070 Ti’s biggest upgrade is the switch to faster GDDR6X memory compared to the GDDR6 of the 3070. The shift from 15Gbps memory to 19Gbps gives the 3070 Ti bandwidth increase of over 30 percent. Regrettably, it’s only got 8GB of memory. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but 1440p and 4K capable cards should ideally have more than 8GB in 2021. The competing RX 6800 has 16GB, and bigger numbers like that on the box do sell cards.
Of course, both of the new GPUs feature all of the tech that Nvidia’s Ampere generation is known for, including its ray tracing capabilities and its ever more impressive DLSS 2.0 technology. This is an area AMD is yet to make an impact. Then there are desirable features such as the multimedia engine, Reflex low latency and Broadcast technologies. These all add value to users coming from older generation cards.
The 3070 Ti supposed to start at around $959 and the 3080 Ti at $1,999, but you can add a good wad of cash on top of that on the street. A glance at a price search engine at the time of writing shows basic 3070 Ti cards selling for well over $1,500. Add over a thousand on top of that for a 3080 Ti. That kind of money will get you a console, a good 4K TV and some games as well. Something’s got to give. It won’t always be like this, and when sanity prevails, at least we’ll still have highly capable graphics cards! Let’s take a look at a selection.