Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti could be launched on May 18, and the graphics card will go on sale just over a week after that on May 26.
That’s the latest rumor from tech site IT Home (as spotted by Wccftech). It backs up the whispers we’ve previously heard about the date that the card will supposedly be available to buy (at least briefly, because if this does come to fruition, stock is likely to disappear very, very swiftly).
- AMD vs Nvidia: which should be your next graphics card?
- Where to buy Nvidia RTX 3080: find stock here
- We'll show you how to build a PC
Hong Kong-based tech site HKEPC previously said that May 26 is the on-sale date, with the RTX 3070 Ti to follow in early June (but there’s no mention of that Ti variant in this new rumor, which could be telling).
At any rate, despite these sources seemingly backing each other up, we obviously still need to be very cautious about the prospect of the dates being correct, and the 3080 Ti being imminent – although purported pallets of the new GPU being shipped have been snapped (and the card has been spotted at an online retailer too). However, as we’ve discussed before, it does seem rather odd that Nvidia would be launching more high-end cards before getting its budget house in order (meaning the rumored RTX 3050 models).
IT Home also reckons that reviews will be published on May 25, the day before the RTX 3080 Ti hits shelves, which makes sense. All of this would be easy enough to guess, of course, so liberal quantities of salt as ever.
Just a few weeks away?
If true, we’ll finally get confirmation on the specs of the RTX 3080 Ti in just three weeks’ time. The rumor mill seems pretty sure that the graphics card will have 10,240 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6X video RAM and a 384-bit memory bus (old rumors pointed to more video memory, 20GB to be precise, but it seems like that’s not happening).
The theory is that Nvidia is also planning to equip this new Ampere variant with anti-mining tech, as was present in the RTX 3060, but was subsequently cracked. Nvidia went back to the drawing board, and apparently the RTX 3080 Ti will come equipped with the new hash rate limiter (and possibly other GPUs too) which cuts mining performance in half.
This is all part of the drive to give gamers a better chance of buying a GPU by putting off crypto-miners (although it remains to be seen how robust the limiter will be this time around when it comes to potentially being hacked).
