Leaked benchmarks put Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU within a whisker of RTX 3090

A hefty cache of alleged benchmarks for the rumoured Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20GB have been released. The numbers from Chinese ‘tuber Big Hardware Player and spotted by Twitter user HXL place the mooted card between the existing RTX 3080 and 3090 boards, but closer to the range-topping megabucks RTX 3090.

The alleged leak includes GPU-Z grabs showing the card with 20GB of memory running over the same 320-bit bus as an RTX 3080 but the same 10,496 Cuda core, 112 ROP and 328 texture unit counts as the RTX 3090. Core and boost clocks are again the same as the 3090, though the RTX 3080 Ti’s memory clock is the slightly slower 1,188MHz of the RTX 3080 rather than the 3090’s 1,219MHz.

The source suggests the board could be branded either RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3080 Super. But the benchmarks include RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 boards as reference points, all running at 4K. Given that the specs of the rumoured card match the RTX 3090 bar slightly less memory bandwidth (and a drop from 24GB to 20GB of VRAM), it’s no surprise to find the RTX 3080 Ti is only just behind the 3090.

Earlier rumours suggested the 3080 Ti would launch in February for around $999. But that notion has since been discarded in favour of the board being delayed ‘indefinitely’, perhaps as a consequence of acute supply shortages afflicting the RTX 30-series.

An RTX 3080 derivative with more memory certainly makes a lot of sense, what with AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series all offering 16GB of VRAM to the RTX 3080’s 10GB and the the RTX 3070’s 8GB, not to mention Nvidia’s own RTX 3060 launching earlier this month with fully 12GB.

It certainly feels like Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series range would be better balanced if the top SKUs were revised with more VRAM. However, with supplies of existing RTX 30 Series GPUs of all flavours remaining incredibly tight, the prospect of a new chipset becoming readily available any time soon seems pretty implausible.

What with supply shortages and insatiable demand for cryptocurrency mining, the supply of GPUs for, you know, actual gaming doesn’t look promising for the foreseeable future.