Introduction

The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra is the company’s premium offering based on NVIDIA’s swanky new RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, which the company hopes will restore its leadership in the high-end gaming graphics segment that felt disputed by the Radeon RX 6900 XT. Along with its sibling, the RTX 3070 Ti, the new graphics cards are a response to AMD’s return to competitiveness in the high-end graphics segment. It has the same mission as the RTX 3080—to offer maxed out gaming at 4K Ultra HD resolution, with raytracing, making it NVIDIA’s new flagship gaming product. The RTX 3090 is still positioned higher, but with its 24 GB memory, is branded as a TITAN-like halo product, capable of certain professional-visualization applications, when paired with NVIDIA’s Studio drivers.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti features a lot more CUDA cores than the RTX 3080—10,240 vs. 8,796, and maxes out the 384-bit wide memory interface of the GA102 silicon, much like the RTX 3090. The memory amount, however, is 12 GB, and runs at 19 Gbps data-rate. The RTX 3080 Ti is based on the Ampere graphics architecture, which debuts the 2nd generation of NVIDIA’s path-breaking RTX real-time raytracing technology. It combines new 3rd generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon to accelerate AI inference performance by an order of magnitude over the previous gen; new 2nd generation RT cores which support even more hardware-accelerated raytracing effects; and the new faster Ampere CUDA core.

The EVGA RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra features the same top-tier iCX3 cooling solution as the top RTX 3090 FTW3, with a smart cooling that relies on several onboard thermal sensors besides what the GPU and memory come with; a meaty heatsink ventilated by a trio of fans, and plenty of RGB LED lighting to add life to your high-end gaming PC build. The PCB has several air guides that let airflow from the fans to pass through, improving ventilation. EVGA is pricing the RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra at $1340, a pretty premium over the $1,200 baseline price of the RTX 3080 Ti.