GeForce RTX 3080 Ti founder edition review - Introduction

GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE (Founder edition) review

Say hello to our newly found friend; yes, the Ti models of the 3080 are being uncovered today. It's a graphics card series that will sit in-between 3080 and 3090 performance levels, and yeah, that is certainly not a bad spot to be positioned in. Yeah, there's no denying it. It has been a bizarre year if we're talking computer components alone, silicon shortages, mining; it's been sour grapes for a long time. Likely that won't even change soon. People are almost fighting to grab a decently proceed graphics card, often running up to three times the MSRP pricing. 

NVIDIA is staying on its trajectory, though, implementing hash-rate limitations for consumer-grade GPUs and releasing refresh products pretty much as scheduled. Today we see such a refresh product, a product that positioned itself in-between the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090. That product would be the GeForce RTX 3080 ti, and probably was the worst kept secret as of late in the history of NVIDIA. 

Armed with a shader core count of 10240 units, this card is paired with 12 GB of GDDR6X graphics memory running 19 Gbps. Much has been said, rumored, and spoken about this card, as with that libidinous shading core count, it is bound to be a bit of a beast in the enthusiast performance segment. You need to remember that it was less than a year ago that NVIDIA launched their Ampere GPU series, September 2020, in fact. A week before announcements, specifications of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090 took a twist; the shader core count mysteriously doubled up from what everybody expected, to date something massively important to this product range as yes, the competition has gotten fiercer as well. 

NVIDIA's GPUs are fabricated on an 8nm node derived from Samsung. This process further develops Samsung's 10nm process; no EUV is applied in production just yet. This second wave of announcements will see the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and next week 3070 Ti (hey, come on, it's not a secret). The desktop product line of Ampere for consumers now entails the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, 3070 8GB GDDR6, RTX 3080 10GB, RTX 3080 Ti 12GB, and RTX 3090; what we test today is a 12GB GDDR6X based close to the premium flagship.

Much like the 3080 and 3090, the 3080 Ti will base based on the existing 28 billion transistors based GA102 GPU from NVIDIA, obviously reconfigured. The card boasts an impressive 10240 Shader processors activated, and mind you; the 3090 has 10496. A big change is that the memory is halved from 24 towards 12 GB (still an excellent number).