The RTX 3080 Ti is here, and I know what you're thinking – why even release an RTX 3080 Ti if the 3080 remains so hard to find? The official answer from Nvidia is binning: chips come off the production line with different levels of quality, and get sorted into different 'bins' based on the performance that each particular bit of silicon is capable of achieving. For the GA102 GPU that lies at the heart of the 3080, 3080 Ti and 3090, the lower tier parts turn into 3080s, better parts into the 3080 Ti and the best of all into the 3090 – and they've been holding onto these middle-tier parts to deploy the long-planned 3080 Ti for some time now.
Whether this translates into a flood of new high-end graphics cards remains to be seen, but in the here and now let's take a look at how Nvidia's new ($1200/£1050) flagship performs.
From the outside, the Nvidia GeForce 3080 Ti Founders Edition we're testing looks nigh-identical to the original 3080 FE – same two-slot cooler, same 12-pin power input, same complement of DisplayPort and HDMI 2.1 ports and even the same colour – there's just a sneaky 'Ti' suffix on the original RTX 3080 wordmark. Beyond that, the only difference is a traditional silver backplate vs the standard black on RTX 3080 and 3090. This makes the card feel more in line with an RTX 3080 than a unique model in its own right, but all of the really interesting stuff is found under the hood – as the specs place this hybrid card far closer to the full-fat RTX 3090 than the 3080 it outwardly resembles.
