Nvidia’s high-end RTX 3080 Ti GPU was initially rumoured to arrive around mid-April, but Nvidia has reportedly delayed this date by a month, according to rumours from ITHome. The report claims (via Google translation) that Nvidia has issued an internal announcement with the release date now being set for mid-May. This card will fill the hefty price gap between the $699 RTX 3080 and the $1,499 RTX 3090, with an MSRP somewhere between the two, around that four-figure mark.
Of course, this latest revelation is still only a rumour – we’ve had no official word from Nvidia on the release date of the card, so there’s every chance this will change in the coming weeks. Recent EEC listings suggest the 3080 Ti isn’t too far from release, however, whatever the date ends up being. If this latest whisper comes true, we could be seeing two big Nvidia graphics card releases in May, as the RTX 3070 Ti is also rumoured for a release that month.
Although there’ll be 3080 Tis available near its MSRP upon release, we can probably expect them to sell out almost immediately and end up being resold at over-inflated prices, like we’ve seen with every recent GPU launch hampered by stock issues.
The 3080 Ti is rumored to pack 10,240 CUDA cores, which is just 2.4% fewer CUDA cores than the pricey 3090. It was originally planned to launch with 20GB of GDDR6X VRAM, but this has since been downgraded to 12GB. Still, this gives the card some serious performance chops, making it a good contender to take the honours of the best graphics card in the future.
However, if Nvidia follows in the steps of the RTX 3060 release where it decided against releasing founder’s edition models, hunting for an RTX 3080 Ti upon launch could be that little bit more tricky.