NVIDIA Teases GeForce RTX 3080 TI, RTX 3070 Ti Ampere Announcement For May 31st
The official NVIDIA GeForce Twitter account this morning tweeted "Get Ready" with a short teaser clip (which doesn't give us any glimpses of the cards, unfortunately). However, the clip confirms that the GeForce keynote will occur at 10 pm EST on May 31st and will be streamed live via YouTube and Twitch.
Earlier this month, NVIDIA announced that its second revision of GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs are Lite Hash Rate (LHR) enabled, which means that they all have a built-in cryptocurrency limiter. All new Ampere GPUs shipping to partners as of late May have the limiter enabled by default.
Get Ready. 🌌 pic.twitter.com/VuDCcKXrry
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) May 26, 2021
The cryptocurrency limiter was first introduced -- to little effect -- with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and was supposed to limit the Ethereum hash rate in half to prevent interest from miners. However, workarounds for the limiter were quickly found. The new cryptocurrency limiter on LHR graphics cards is rumored to be more robust, but we don't at this time know what changes/updates NVIDIA has made to it.
There's no question that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti will come fresh out of the gate with the cryptocurrency limiter enabled.
NVIDIA's OEM partners have ignored any embargos that have been set, as Razer's Chinese division recently started taking preorders for desktop PCs equipped with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti. Likewise, MSI's website briefly featured product listings for its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti family. Further fueling excitement around the launch, both MSI and Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cards have been spotted for sale in retail packing in recent weeks.
According to the most recent leaks, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is tipped to feature 10,240 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6X memory (384-bit bus), and a maximum boost clock of 1,665MHz. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, on the other hand, will have 6,144 CUDA cores and 8GB GDDR6X memory. Based on the current retail pricing of the GeForce RTX 30 Series, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti should come in at the $599 price point.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, however, has a wide [potential] price target between the $699 GeForce RTX 3080 and the $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090. We'd place our bets on $999, but who knows how that pricing will play out once the limited supply of cards starts hitting the streets.
