Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti reportedly delayed — thanks to AMD's unimpressive showing

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Those holding out for a RTX 3080 Ti may have to wait a little longer

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti has reportedly been delayed from January to February as the company continues to try and meet high demand for its current crop of cards. Just as important, AMD's RX 6000 series is not proving to be much of a threat. 

According to German journalist Igor Wallossek of Igor's Lab, Nvidia had been awaiting the launch of the RX 6000 series before officially unveiling the RTX 3080 Ti. While the RTX 3080 only has 10GB of RAM when compared to the RX 6800 XT's 16GB, it hasn't shifted the conversation away from Nvidia. 

On paper, the RX 6800 XT should pull ahead from Nvidia. Yet tests continue to show the two cards going almost neck-and-neck in titles like Cyberpunk 2077, and in some cases team green is pulling ahead. 

According to Wallossek's sources, which go down to the supply chain, the 3080 Ti will launch after the Chinese New Year (Feb. 11-17). Tom's Guide was able to corroborate this with our own sources.

When compared to the standard RTX 3080, the upcoming 3080 Ti is reported to have double the RAM at 20GB. For most titles this would be overkill. But in games like Cyberpunk 2077, per testing by Digital Foundry, it found the 24GBs of GDDR6X RAM in the RTX 3090 beneficial to overall performance. 

There are also reports of two RTX 3060 variants to be announced at CES 2021. The RTX 3060 12GB will aim to take on the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB. While the 3050 Ti will be rebranded as the RTX 3060 6GB. The 12GB variant is looking to be a significant upgrade over the RTX 2060 Super, which had 8GB of RAM by comparison.

Wallossek has been hearing varying bits of information regarding the 3060 from different sources. This could either be miscommunication from Nvidia's part, or a tactic to try and discern leakers. For that reason, Wallossek was careful not to reveal more finite detail. At the moment, the RTX 3060 line is rumored to launch in January.

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Imad Khan
Imad Khan

Imad is currently Senior Google and Internet Culture reporter for CNET, but until recently was News Editor at Tom's Guide. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with the New York Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, Wired and Men's Health Magazine, among others. Outside of work, you can find him sitting blankly in front of a Word document trying desperately to write the first pages of a new book.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Valantar
    What an utterly baffling take on this. What does "On paper, the RX 6800 XT should pull ahead from Nvidia." even mean? Do GPUs from different brands have on-paper specification that can be compared to give a realistic performance estimates? No, they don't. TFlops aren't comparable across architectures, VRAM amounts only matter when there's not enough, etc., etc. AMD's marketing said the 6800 XT matched or beat the RTX 3080, which was slightly optimistic, as they are more typically tied. Calling this an unimpressive showing ... how? This is AMD's first competitive high-end GPU in five years. Is it impressive? That's debatable. At the very least it's pretty damn good. Is it "unimpressive"? Not by any sensible measure. Catching up to Nvidia's massive lead in both absolute performance and power efficiency (where AMD is now unequivocally ahead) is very impressive considering where AMD started out from a couple of years back. Most people thought this would never happen.

    If Nvidia is postponing the 3080 Ti because of the 6800 series' performance, it's not because they were unimpressive, but because AMD didn't actually deliver a better value proposition or markedly better absolute performance, both of which would have pretty much necessitated a response from Nvidia. Instead they are now quite evenly matched, meaning Nvidia can wait it out for a while yet, and keep raking in cash from existing models rather than spending a ton on creating a new SKU with little going for it.
    Reply
  • russell_john
    The 3080 Ti will come out on 7nm ...... But it will be Samsung's 7nm EUV line that's cranking up with a big investment from IBM who already announced a 15 core 120 thread (not a typo) Power10 server CPU

    8nm+ was just a stop gap measure .......
    Reply
  • russell_john
    Valantar said:
    What an utterly baffling take on this. What does "On paper, the RX 6800 XT should pull ahead from Nvidia." even mean? Do GPUs from different brands have on-paper specification that can be compared to give a realistic performance estimates? No, they don't. TFlops aren't comparable across architectures, VRAM amounts only matter when there's not enough, etc., etc. AMD's marketing said the 6800 XT matched or beat the RTX 3080, which was slightly optimistic, as they are more typically tied. Calling this an unimpressive showing ... how? This is AMD's first competitive high-end GPU in five years. Is it impressive? That's debatable. At the very least it's pretty damn good. Is it "unimpressive"? Not by any sensible measure. Catching up to Nvidia's massive lead in both absolute performance and power efficiency (where AMD is now unequivocally ahead) is very impressive considering where AMD started out from a couple of years back. Most people thought this would never happen.

    If Nvidia is postponing the 3080 Ti because of the 6800 series' performance, it's not because they were unimpressive, but because AMD didn't actually deliver a better value proposition or markedly better absolute performance, both of which would have pretty much necessitated a response from Nvidia. Instead they are now quite evenly matched, meaning Nvidia can wait it out for a while yet, and keep raking in cash from existing models rather than spending a ton on creating a new SKU with little going for it.

    Actually on paper the 3080 wins because it has both faster memory and a considerably wider memory buss ..... I don't care how good your cache technology is, a 256 bit wide memory buss with slower memory will always lose to a 384 bit wide memory buss with faster memory ..... If Nvidia goes over to 7nm it's Game Over because then they'll have the higher clock speeds and power efficiency to go along with what they already have ...... AMD is bottlenecked by the memory speed and buss width ...... Plus no decent RT cores and nothing that comes close to competing with Tensor AI cores and the DLSS technology it brings to the table .....
    Reply