Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

Say hello to diminishing returns

- JARRED WALTON

IT’S TIME ONCE more for the mid-cycle upgrades. After last year’s big reveal of the Ampere architecture and its higher performance, Nvidia is back to fill in the gaps. Add some additional cores, bump clock speeds a bit, and toss in some extra memory and the associated memory bandwidth. Et voila, we have the RTX 3080 Ti, filling the small gap between the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. Nvidia pitches this as the “ultimate Ti” and makes reference to the still excellent GTX 1080 Ti, but it fails to live up to those lofty expectations.

On paper, the 3080 Ti looks a lot like the 3090, just with half the VRAM and two fewer SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors). Considering most games don’t need anything like 24GB of memory, which is more useful for professional workloads, we expect the 3080 Ti to land closer to the 3090 than the 3080. And it does.