Leaker @momomo_us on Twitter today posted screenshots showing MSI's website with a listing for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, seemingly confirming the card's existence. Since the Tweet went out, MSI has quickly fixed the listing, so you won't find it on the website anymore.
This little hiccup seems and indicates that Nvidia's AIB partners (like MSI) have reference and (maybe) custom cards ready for release, or will soon. In fact, we covered a rumored MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X card floating around in the UAE not too long ago.
What we don't know is when exactly Nvidia plans to unveil its new flagship GPU, or what pricing will be. All we can make are educated guesses.
Rumored specifications for the RTX 3080 Ti include 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores and 80 RT cores, as well as a potential 1,365MHz base clock and 1,666MHz boost clock.
For memory, the RTX 3080 Ti is believed to be running 12GB of GDDR6X clocked at 19Gbps. This should mean that the RTX 3080 Ti will run with a 384-bit memory bus and have 912.4 GBps of memory bandwidth.
The RTX 3080 Ti should be running off the same core as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, the GA102 die. But, with Nvidia refreshing its Ampere silicon to fight Ethereum miners, this core is rumored to be the GA102-225-A1 die.
The 225 numbering in the middle specifically indicates that this is newer Ampere silicon with the built-in hardware mining limiter. We don't know how bad the mining limitations will be, but if previous Nvidia mining limiters are anything to go by, we should expect mining performance to be cut at least in half with the RTX 3080 Ti.
As for gaming performance, the RTX 3080 Ti specs should land the GPUs capabilities incredibly close to that of Nvidia's flagship RTX 3090, making it one of the best graphics cards on the market. The reduction in CUDA core count is a measly 2.5%. For perspective, you should be able to overclock an RTX 3080 Ti beyond the performance of a stock RTX 3090 when it comes to gaming workloads; the CUDA core configurations are that similar.
However, be prepared to grab the cards as fast as you possibly can upon release if you want one. Scalpers will probably still be a problem, even with miners out of the equation.
