Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 Posted by Jim Thacker

Nvidia launches GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti


Nvidia has unveiled the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, the latest cards in its current-gen GeForce RTX 30 Series of gaming GPUs based on its new Ampere GPU architecture.

The cards fill out the high end of the GeForce RTX line-up, now also increasingly used for GPU rendering, with the RTX 3080 Ti offering GPU compute performance close to that of the top-of-the-range RTX 3090.

Below, you can find the key specifications and DCC application benchmarks for the new cards, both of which should become available to buy later this month.

Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU specifications
RTX 3090 RTX 3080 Ti RTX 3080 RTX 3070 Ti RTX 3070
Architecture Ampere Ampere Ampere Ampere Ampere
Process 8nm 8nm 8nm 8nm 8nm
CUDA cores 10,496 10,240 8,704 6,144 5,888
Tensor cores* 328 320 272 192 184
RT cores* 82 80 68 48 46
Base clock (GHz) 1.40 1.37 1.44 1.58 1.50
Boost clock (GHz) 1.70 1.67 1.71 1.77 1.73
Compute performance
FP32 (Tflops)*
35.6 34.1 29.8 21.8 20.3
GPU memory 24GB
GDDR6X
12GB
GDDR6X
10GB
GDDR6X
8GB
GDDR6X
8GB
GDDR6
NVLink Yes No No No No
TDP 350W 350W 320W 290W 220W
Release date Sept 2020 June 2021 Sept 2020 June 2021 Oct 2020
MSRP
(Founders Edition)
$1,499 $1,199 $699 $599 $499

*Figures taken from third-party website

Higher specs than the original GeForce RTX 3080 and 3070 – but also correspondingly higher prices
Both cards represent a step up in power from last year’s original GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 GPUs.

In particular, the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is a significant advance on the RTX 3080.

Its CUDA core count and GPU compute performance, and its complement of RT ray tracing cores, are all much closer to the top-of-the-range card in the GeForce RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3090.

With a MSRP of $1,199 – $500 higher than the original – its price is also much closer to the RTX 3090.

GPU memory is up, too, although at 12GB, it still has only half the capacity of the RTX 3090.

The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is a much smaller change from the RTX 3070.

While its CUDA core count and overall GPU compute performance are both up slightly from its predecessor, there is no increase in RT cores or GPU memory capacity.

It’s also positioned at a similar price point, with an MSRP of $599 as opposed to $499.


Click thumbnail to view full-size image


Arnold, Blender, V-Ray and OctaneRender benchmarks
The new cards straddle the increasingly blurred line between Nvidia’s consumer and professional GPUs, with Nvidia describing them both in a blog post as “rendering powerhouses”.

You can get some idea of how their specs translate to DCC work from the benchmark chart above, which shows the relative performance of the new cards to their previous-gen equivalents.

The figures are based on the standard Blender benchmark, although the render times are much longer than those shown on the Blender OpenData website, so we aren’t sure exactly how they were calculated.


Click thumbnail to view full-size image


However, on paper, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti looks like a cheaper alternative to the RTX 3090 – described by Jason Lewis in his recent CG Channel review as “one of the best GPUs that money can buy” for DCC work – for anyone who doesn’t need to routinely render scenes larger than its 12GB of graphics memory.

A separate Nvidia benchmark chart, embedded above, shows its performance relative to previous-gen cards in other GPU rendering apps, including Arnold, V-Ray and OctaneRender.

But will they all be snapped up by cryptocurrency miners?
Of course, that’s all academic if you can’t get your hands on one of the new cards, something that has been a real problem with current-gen Nvidia GPUs of late.

Last month, the firm announced that it was limiting the Ethereum hash rate of new GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 cards in an attempt to reduce their appeal to cryptocurrency miners.

The firm’s blog posts announcing the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti don’t mention hash rates, but leaked specs reported online last week suggests that the same applies to the new cards.

Pricing and release dates
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ships on 3 June 2021 with a MSRP of $1,199. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti ships later in June with a MSRP of $599.

Read more about the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce 3070 Ti on Nvidia’s blog