NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti rumored to launch mid-April, speculated to retail for US$999 ^↺

There have been several rumors about NVIDIA planning to launch an RTX 3080 Ti for quite some time now. Initially, we expected the card to launch in January but then we learnt that the GA102 card would be pushed to February. Now, we are getting to know that the RTX 3080 Ti would have a mid-April release but with some reduction in CUDA core counts.

MyDrivers reports (via ChannelGate) that the RTX 3080 Ti is "almost certain" to have a mid-April launch date. Initial rumors indicated that NVIDIA would be equipping the card with 20 GB of GDDR6X memory, but the publication notes that it is still speculative. The more recent rumors suggest a 12 GB GDDR6X possibility, though.

The exact specifications of the RTX 3080 Ti are still elusive, but we hear that NVIDIA may offer just 10,240 CUDA cores on the RTX 3080 Ti as opposed to the initial speculation of 10,496 CUDA cores as found in the RTX 3090. That is still a decent 17.6% increase in CUDA core count compared to the RTX 3080, but how well that translates to real-world performance remains to be seen — we've only seen about 10 to 15% benefit in 4K gaming moving from an RTX 3080 to an RTX 3090.

Similar to the approach taken with the RTX 3060, the upcoming RTX 3080 Ti is also expected to implement a cryptocurrency hash rate limiter, though whether that approach actually makes sense or not is debatable. With the RTX 3080 Ti expected to arrive approximately eight months after the original RTX 3080 launch, we hope that supply constraints would largely ease by then.