NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition review: All hail the new 4K gaming king

Performance of a RTX 3090 in gaming but at US$300 less.

By HardwareZone Team - 5 Jun 2021

Note: This review was first published on 2 June 2021.

NVIDIA’s most opened secret of 2021, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, is out. Quite literally, by the time you read this NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition version as well as those from partners the likes of ASUS, Gigabyte and ZOTAC will be available for purchase from 3 June onwards. But before we go into the card’s performance, let’s talk quickly about the new card’s hardware design first.

I’ve always admired the hardware design of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition series, and the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition ranked as one of the best-looking graphics cards in my books. It is modern-looking, elegant and devoid of the aggressive “gamer-ish” accents seen in many partners’ cards. It’s a matter of personal taste, of course, but you can’t deny that the Founders Edition cards, especially the RTX 30 Series, looks and feel exceptionally premium.

With the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition, NVIDIA has stuck with the same gorgeous shroud design as the RTX 3080 FE’s, certainly a confidence that the same cooling block will be able to handle the anticipatedly higher heat output from the new GPU. It’s even got the same 12-pin connector located out of the middle of the card’s side and comes with a Y-cable adapter that hooks to two traditional 8-pin PSU power connectors. As with the RTX 3080 FE, you’ll need a 750W-rated PSU to run the RTX 3080 Ti FE too.

Specifications

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the direct successor to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. (Credit: NVIDIA)

In terms of where it stacks in NVIDIA’s RTX 30-Series SKUs, the RTX 3080 Ti is essentially the generational successor to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and sits between the vanilla RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Let’s look at the specifications:

	RTX 3080	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3090
GPU	GA102-200	GA102-225	GA102-300
SM	68	80	82
CUDA Cores	8704	10240	10496
RT	68	80	82
Tensor Cores	272	320	328
ROPs	96	112	112
GPU Base clock	1440 MHz	1370 MHz	1395 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1710 MHz	1670 MHz	1695 MHz
Memory	10 GB GDDR6X	12 GB GDDR6X	24 GB GDDR6X
Memory speed	19 Gbps	19 Gbps	19.5 Gbps
Bandwidth	760 GB/s	912 GB/s	936 GB/s
Memory bus	320-bit	384-bit	384-bit
TGP	320W	350W	350W
MSRP	US$699	US$1,199	US$1,499

In terms of raw hardware specifications, the RTX 3080 Ti features 12GB of GDDR6X video memory (an extra 2 GB over last year’s RTX 3080, which launched at US$699). But look closer at the table above again and you can see the reason that the RTX 3080 Ti is priced much closer to the RTX 3090, than the RTX 3080, is that its specs are much closer to those of the RTX 3090 on paper - aside from having half the VRAM. So, while the RTX 3080 Ti is essentially a souped-up version of the RTX 3080, it’s probably not farfetched to also consider it as an “RTX 3090 Lite”, which seems to be more technically accurate.

The key spec for the new GPU is the 80 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) it lays claim to, which is a notable bump over the RTX 3080's 68. With each SM housing 128 CUDA Cores, we are looking at a total of 10,240 CUDA Cores with the RTX 3080 Ti. That's a lot, and not far off the 10,752 of the RTX 3090. The chip's 80 RT cores should also mean it'll be able to deliver better ray-tracing performance, while the 320 Tensor Cores will help with NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 cleverness.

If you're wondering why the RTX 3080 Ti has slightly slower clocks than the RTX 3080, don't be fooled. This is because the new GPU has more CUDA Cores to keep it cool, and ultimately, will still have notably better performance due to the amount of CUDA Cores on offer, despite the disparity in speed. It's the same reason why the RTX 3090 easily outclassed the RTX 3080, despite featuring lower clock speed, even before the arrival of the RTX 3080 Ti.

I’ve already covered the RTX 30-Series quite extensively, including my review of the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. Apart from sharing the same design, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti also comes with all of the same bells and whistles as the vanilla RTX 3080 – including DLSS, ray-tracing, and Reflex technologies – so I won’t go into detail about the card’s tech features. If this is your first time reading up about an RTX 30-Series card, or have not read my RTX 3080 FE review, I do recommend you do so. Otherwise, let’s check out how the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition fared in our benchmarks.

Our Test Rig

Now for the fun part – performance! Here's a quick look at our test rig's specifications:

Naturally, we’ll be stacking the RTX 3080 Founders Edition Ti against the rest of the RTX 30-Series Founders Edition cards. This includes the RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and of course the RTX 3090. The following synthetic benchmarks and games were run, with the games chosen from a wide range of genres to give a better indication of performance across different segments:

3DMark
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Total War: Three Kingdoms (Battle)
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Metro: Exodus
Watch Dogs: Legion

3DMark

3DMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

Unsurprisingly, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti knocks the wind out of the rest of the cards here, including the RTX 3080. Interestingly, the RTX 3080 Ti pretty much scores neck to neck with the RTX 3090 in DirectX 11 synthetic tests but still lags behind the same card in DirectX 12 (Time Spy) tests. Let's look at how it performs in the real world with our selected games.

DX12-based Games in 1080p / 1440p / 4K - in fps

In DX12-based games benchmarks, the true performance of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti shows. It's certainly no surprise that it blazes past the RTX 3070 card and those below it, or that it offers between 7-10% in performance gain over the vanilla RTX 3080 in the games tested. No, the really interesting insight here is how the card performed so much closer to the RTX 3090. Clearly, unless heavy content creation production works is a requirement where the additional 12GB of the RTX 3090 will come in handy, the RTX 3080 Ti is a much more practical choice for gamers going for the high-end gaming experience.

Ray Tracing & DLSS Performance

Games that supports ray-tracing have been increasing by the numbers over the last couple of years and the technology is certainly more meaningful now than when it debuted in mainstream gaming in 2018. The problem with turning on ray-tracing in games that support the feature is the performance hit, especially at higher resolutions. And as you can see below, my tests were quite brutal with 4K at maximum settings for ray-tracing, but it's an interesting benchmark nonetheless to see where the RTX 3080 Ti stands in relationship to the vanilla RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

Once again, we see how much closer the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti is to the RTX 3090 than the original RTX 3080 in the ray-tracing and DLSS results. The higher RT and Tensor Cores of the RTX 3080 Ti does give a clear edge over the RTX 3080 in all ray-tracing and DLSS scenarios. DLSS really is the key here across both 1440p and 4K. If you're aiming for 4K gaming, with ray-tracing switched on, then clearly you'll want to turned on DLSS as well. Even then, the RTX 3080 Ti is the clear choice for the best experience

Conclusion

The RTX 3080 Ti is a cool US$300 lesser than the RTX 3090, but it is also US$500 more expensive than the US$699 vanilla RTX 3080. In truth, the RTX 3080 still has a lot of legs and mileage to run modern games at 4K, and I think with the presence of the RTX 3080 Ti now, the true value of the RTX 3080's worth becomes even more obvious considering its-still-great gaming performance but at nearly half the cost of the new GPU. But I digress.

Whether the more premium RTX 3080 Ti makes sense to you depends on whether you're aiming for "RTX 3090-ish" gaming performance, but without the need for more than 12GB of memory. Then you are pretty much saving US$300 in this instance. Or, if you do not have and have no intention of upgrading to a 4K/120Hz gaming monitor, then save the US$500 and stick with the RTX 3080 or any of the lower-tier RTX 30 Series cards.

In summary, the key question is this; Is the GeForce RTX 3090 still the best consumer-grade graphics card? Well, yes. But is the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the better card for gaming? Absolutely, without question. The RTX 3080 Ti is basically as fast as the RTX 3090, and unless you need the additional 12GB VRAM offered on the latter to run content creation or scientific-level work, it is the graphics card of choice for the best gaming performance you can get right now.

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