Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition: A Muscled-Up Middle Child

REVIEWS/HARDWARE

- CHRIS STOBING

It’s been one heck of a year in the world of desktop graphics cards. From silicon shortages to cryptocurrency craziness, the average price of a graphics card in 2021 has surged past all expectations, with models both used and new selling for multiples more than the original prices, even years after their initial release. Realities of the current marketplace aside, though, we’re here to talk about the objective performance of the latest object of desire for GPU shoppers (and likely newest target for scalpers), the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and how it stacks up against its own (hopefully, one day!) objective manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $1,199.

Let’s start off this graphics card review the same way we’ve started many over the past 12 months: We know you likely will not find the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti at its MSRP for the foreseeable future, and those who do manage to get their hands on the card at a fair price likely will have done so either through a quick trigger finger, via the luck of a draw on a GPU lottery, or by fighting fire with fire and employing a card-buying bot of their own.

For those determined buyers, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a gaming powerhouse almost worth fighting the hordes for. Its high price is the only thing that keeps it from true greatness. It’s supposed to be a slightly less powerful, slightly less pricey GeForce RTX 3090 for gamers and creators. But that means it also comes with the same caveat as the original: Even with a lower MSRP than the RTX 3090, the original Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition sets up the RTX 3080 Ti for some seriously out-of-whack price-to-performance ratios.