NVIDIA Announces GeForce RTX 3080 Ti & 3070 Ti At Computex 2021

As with many of its competitors, NVIDIA has had a lot to talk about at the ongoing Computex virtual event, and for desktop gamers and creators, the most notable announcements will be tied to the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti graphics cards – effectively the sixth and seventh Ampere releases for the desktop. If you’re familiar with Ti cards from the past, you probably know what to expect here.

Between the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, it’s the former that sees the bigger improvement over its non-Ti counterpart. The 3080 Ti sees an additional 2GB of memory added to the frame buffer (for 12GB), as well as an increase in overall memory bandwidth. That comes in addition to a performance bump that situates it super-close to the RTX 3090.

It might seem unusual for NVIDIA to place the new RTX 3080 Ti so close in performance to the RTX 3090, but it’s probably a great thing for gamers, since 24GB of memory is largely overkill at this point. It’s not overkill for high-end creators, however, so designers wanting some serious breathing room would still do well to eye the big gun. You simply can’t get that much memory in a consumer GPU otherwise. Anything higher, and you’d be suddenly looking at NVIDIA’s high-end workstation options.

As for the RTX 3070 Ti, that card sees more modest improvements over the non-Ti, although a subtle bump lurks in the table above: the Ti switches to GDDR6X memory, from GDDR6. That’s a change that makes a huge improvement to the bandwidth, despite keeping the same 8GB density. Notably, the 3070 Ti jumps from 220W to 290W TGP, so that faster memory definitely craves more power.

While NVIDIA obviously caters to gamers in a major way, the love for creative audiences has been growing rapidly the past few years, and this launch proves it yet again. We were provided examples of how much these new NVIDIA GPUs can improve rendering times, such as with Blender, and if you’ve checked out our in-depth Blender looks in the past, you’ll probably know what the company’s talking about. With Blender 2.93’s release due any day now, we’re soon to revisit!

With chip shortages and price gouging making it harder than ever to secure a new graphics card, we’re hopeful these new options will help in some way. More product coming out is a good thing, but with the current market, you’ll be really lucky to get the actual model you want, and at fair pricing. All we can say is, good luck.