Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti leak sets up potential Big Navi showdown

Are leaks exciting? Here at WePC we aren’t sure but there certainly seems to be interest online in Nvidia’s potential 3080 Ti.

At least this one has come from prominent leaker Kopite7Kimi on Twitter, but the thing about leaks is nobody ever highlights the ones that turn out to be nonsense.

Nvidia hasn’t even managed to sort out its stock issue on the cards that definitely exist so mythical cards such as this one still have some way to go.

One of the other issues, if the leak turns out to be true, is how Nvidia will manage to differentiate it from the 3090. Somewhere along the line you would expect it’s clock speed to be hamstrung and Kopite7Kimi insists there will be now NVLink support to the chance of hooking up two together (assuming you can ever actually find two to buy!) will remain the sole domain of the 3090

Where the 3080 Ti looks like it could differentiate from the standard RTX 3080 is by doubling the onboard RAM to 20GB of GDDR6X VRAM.

The leak suggests that the power draw will remain the same at 320W and will need to offer enough of a benefit to allow it to sit at a price point that is not dramatically higher than the 3080 if it is to compete with Big Navi from AMD.

The battleground for GPUs is getting interesting. AMD’s shot across the bows last week seems to have startled Nvidia who are still in the throes of manufacturing headaches trying to get the 3070, 3080, and 3090 into expectant customer’s hands.

Pretty much as soon as stock is manufactured it is selling out or fulfilling delayed orders so prices don’t look likely to drop to any kind of standard in the near future, making it harder still to get the prices right.

Add in a little consumer skepticism after what has happened and the reputational damage to one of PC hardware’s biggest players and there is zero room for any more hold-ups or mistakes.

Customer trust is already pretty low, and with AMD possibly about to have their own stock issues on Zen 3 CPUs and their own line of GPUs due out int he following weeks, this is few weeks of computing history where the ramifications might be felt for several years when it comes to getting people to pre0order new products again.