Conclusion
NVIDIA has launched its continuing Ti series among the RTX 30-Series of video cards. The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition sits at the top of the throne, and as NVIDIA puts it is: “The New Gaming Flagship.” It certainly carries a flagship MSRP at $1,199. However, this is cheaper than the official MSRP on the GeForce RTX 3090 which is $1,499. Still, this is a long way from the $699 price tag of the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE
What do you get for that price premium? Well, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti actually does offer quite a bit according to our testing. Its specifications more closely matches the GeForce RTX 3090, with only some small differences between them, relatively speaking.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has 10,240 CUDA Cores and the GeForce RTX 3090 has 10,496, which is not a big difference. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE has 112 ROPs, exactly the same as the GeForce RTX 3090. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE has 320 TMUs, only 8 shy of the GeForce RTX 3090’s 328. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE has 80 RT Cores and 320 Tensor Cores, which compare to the RTX 3090’s 82 RT Cores and 328 Tensor Cores. They also both have exactly the same 384-bit memory bus.
One discerning factor though, is the RTX 3090 has 24GB of GDDR6X while the RTX 3080 Ti has 12GB of GDDR6X. They both have over 900GB/s of memory bandwidth though, and the same TDP of 350W. What’s more, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE is able to squeeze all of this into the smaller GeForce RTX 3080 FE board package size.
Performance
What really surprised us in testing is not only how close the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE and GeForce RTX 3090 were, we thought as much, but the fact the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE can at times beat the RTX 3090. Now, remember, we were using a GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3090 GAMING OC video card here for comparison. It has a factory overclock and runs faster than a Founders Edition GeForce RTX 3090 would. Yet, in our testing, we still saw the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE either matching and sometimes beating it in performance.
How does it do this? Quite simply it comes down to clock speed. With the core specifications being so close, to the point of almost not even mattering for performance, any advantage in GPU clock speed is going to prevail. The fact is, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE is boosting higher than even our factory overclocked GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3090 GAMING OC video card. That raw frequency increase is enough to offset the difference since the specifications are so close. This would be even more exaggerated if we had used a Founders Edition GeForce RTX 3090.
The end result is that in our gaming experiences today, at 1440p or 4K you can get GeForce RTX 3090 like performance, out of a card that is priced at a lower MSRP. This allows very high framerates at 1440p, with Ray Tracing. Turn on DLSS at 1440p with Ray Tracing and performance is very high. At 4K games are also going to be the most playable on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE. Ray Tracing can demand a lot from games at 4K, but DLSS can improve upon performance quite a bit. You can also turn on DLSS without Ray Tracing for a big bump on “Ultra” settings at 4K.
VRAM
The 12GB of VRAM on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE did not hold us back in our gaming experiences in this review, even at 4K with Ray Tracing or DLSS. In fact, it’s an improvement over what the GeForce RTX 3080 offers with only 10GB. Let’s be honest, 12GB is what the RTX 3080 should have been from the get-go. But at least now we have that with the RTX 3080 Ti FE, and honestly, nothing less would be acceptable.
The 24GB of VRAM on the GeForce RTX 3090 is great for workstation-class applications, but for gaming, it could be seen as overkill right now. 12-16GB is a good balance for 4K gaming at this time. One issue is that the RTX 3090, RTX 3080 Ti, and Radeon RX 6900 XT aren’t quite fast enough to max out games at the highest possible settings with Ray Tracing at 4K. Faster performance is needed to saturate that framebuffer. While games are getting more intense, features like DLSS and AMD’s upcoming method also lessen this burden on the framebuffer.
Final Points
When it comes down to it, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition is providing the same bump in performance from the GeForce RTX 3080 FE that the RTX 3090 offered. It actually makes the GeForce RTX 3090 look like a bad value for gaming. Going by MSRP the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE is cheaper and offers the same performance and gameplay experience as the GeForce RTX 3090. We are of course focusing on gameplay performance and the experience provided by both video cards and comparing all cards by the MSRP, not the street pricing.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FE will give you a noticeably better experience than the GeForce RTX 3080, and Radeon RX 6900 XT. It runs Ray Tracing faster, and with DLSS performance can be improved without losing image quality. DLSS has come a long way, and DLSS 2.0 provides high performance at 4K with no image quality loss using Quality mode.