Nvidia’s unannounced GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is coming soon, and some retailers have already started listing it for sale. Polish retailor X-Kom listed the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X OC, adding credibility to a photo showing a pallet of these MSI cards that made the rounds last week. Although you can’t pre-order the card, X-Kom has kept the listing up since Wccftech spotted it a few days ago, suggesting that an announcement and pre-orders are coming soon.
The timeline makes sense, as we’re about a month out from the rumored May 26 launch date. Reports indicate that the RTX 3080 Ti will launch for $999 with 12GB of VRAM and a redesigned GPU core with a cryptocurrency hash rate limiter. That should make the RTX 3080 Ti less attractive for crypto miners and hopefully push some toward the Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) range.
The listing doesn’t confirm the May 26 launch date, and it doesn’t offer any indication of how much the card will cost. That said, X-Kom has a notification system in place for when the card goes live.
If previous Ampere launches are anything to go by, Nvidia will likely hold a virtual event announcing the RTX 3080 Ti. The last consumer-focused event was in January during CES 2021. There, Nvidia announced RTX 30-series laptops and the RTX 3060, and it announced the event nearly a month in advance. So far, Nvidia hasn’t announced another event.
It’s possible Nvidia is trying to keep this launch under the radar, as it expects graphics card demand to exceed supply throughout 2021. In addition to gamers and crypto miners looking for the latest graphics cards, a global semiconductor shortage has tightened supply chains and made it more difficult to manufacture PC components. Some scalper groups have become very profitable off the envied graphics cards, too, causing cards to sometimes sell out in a matter of seconds.
Nvidia probably won’t announce the RTX 3080 Ti alone. Reports show that the RTX 3070 Ti should come in June, and laptops with the rumored RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti have already been listed for sale.
The MSI RTX 3080 Ventus 3X comes with a triple fan design, three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, and an HDMI 2.1 output. The RTX 3080 Ti should come with the same cooling solution and connectivity. Over the 3080, though, the 3080 Ti is rumored to come with 12GB of VRAM and a bump from 8,704 CUDA cores to 10,240 CUDA cores — nearly matching the $1,500 RTX 3090.
