VideoCardz has shared a photograph of what appears to be Nvidia's GA102-225-A1 die, which is reportedly going into the forthcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card. To put the icing on the cake, the publication also released a screenshot of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's mining performance in Ethereum.
Given the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's position in Nvidia's Ampere product stack, it shouldn't come as a surpise that it would leverage the GA102 silicon, the same one that powers the GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080. However, there's a twist. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would reportedly employ the GA102-225-A1 die that features Nvidia's Ethereum mining limiter. This falls in line with the ongoing rumor that Nvidia is giving its Ampere silicon an overhaul to cripple mining performance.
As far as specifications go, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is still rumored to feature 80 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM), amounting to 10,240 CUDA cores, 320 Tensor cores and 80 RT cores. Today's leak also exposes the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's clock speeds, which seems to have a 1,365 MHz base clock and 1,665 MHz boost clock.
On the memory side, the graphics card is expected to run with 12GB of GDDR6X memory at 19 Gbps. If that's the case, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will likely utilize a 384-bit memory interface and can pump out a memory bandwidth up to 912.4 GBps.
If the mining limiter didn't exist, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti would deliver an Ethereum hash rate up to 118.9 MH/s, and would ultimately be one of the best mining GPUs on the market. For comparison, the GeForce RTX 3080 offers around 95 MH/s, while the GeForce RTX 3090 has the potential to offer a hash rate between 120 to 125 MH/s.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's Ethereum performance aligns with what we expected. Of course, there were a few optimizations behind the scenes. For example, the user had reduced the graphics card's TDP to 278W and overclocked the memory from the rumored 19 Gbps to 21.4 Gbps.
However, consumers shouldn't have to worried about cryptocurrency miners when the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti launches. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti pictured may be a qualification sample (QS) that dates prior to the introduction of the anti-mining limiter. This is evident as the driver itself didn't recognize the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or it would have sliced the mining performance in half easily.
While the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti shouldn't be on miners' radars, consumers will still have to fend off scalpers. It's feasible that Nvidia will unleash the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in May as shipments are allegedly on the way to U.S. retailers. Previously, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti was rumored to retail for $999, however, a new leak suggests a MSRP of $1,099.
