AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT is said to go head-to-head with the high-end performance of the Nvidia RTX 3090, but at a much lower price, Nvidia may be trying to rebound AMD's efforts with a completely new graphics card, the often rumored RTX 3080 Ti. Nvidia may be trying to rebound AMD's efforts with an all-new graphics card, the often-rumored RTX 3080 Ti. Rumor has it that this new card could appear as early as January.

This is according to at least one Taiwanese board manufacturer who spoke to HKEPC. According to the website, the RTX 3080 Ti will offer the same price as the RX 6900 XT at $999 and feature nearly identical specifications to the RTX 3090 in everything but memory configuration.

The RTX 3090 has 24GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit memory bus, while rumor has it that the RTX 3080 Ti will only have 20GB on a 320-bit interface. That's right, how will it survive?" Reportedly, the TDP will remain at 320W, but NVLink will also be removed from the slightly lower spec cards.

The HEKPC report (translated by Google) further states that the RTX 3080 Ti is going to get a more aggressive price/performance ratio, which seems obvious if such a card exists. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the RTX 3090 will be positioned after its release and how the RTX 3080 Ti will be positioned in terms of performance.

The RTX 3090 offers at most a 15% performance gain on gaming workloads compared to the RTX 3080 in our tests, dropping to 2% on some runs (with negligible gains on rare occasions). There is not much room for the card to position itself between the two in terms of performance, especially given that the RTX 3090 has a much larger cooler installed and its chombo GPU is already impressively high clocked for such a big name.

However, when it comes to price, there is clearly plenty of room for a high-end card to enter the fray: the RTX 3080 has an MSRP of $699 and the RTX 3090 is $1,499.

This calculation does not paint a rosy picture for the RTX 3090, and even more so if Nvidia releases a $500 cheaper RTX 3080 Ti in January.

This is still just a rumor, but let's not pretend we're hearing about a possible RTX 3080 Ti for the first time: Twitter leaker Kopite7kimi has reported a card between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 several times. Most recently, this leaker claimed that an RTX 3080 Ti with 20GB of GDDR6X memory, 10,496 FP32 cores, the same TGP, and no NVLink would line up with HEKPC's report.

Whatever the exact specifications, there is no doubt that Nvidia is preparing some form of answer to AMDs entire 6000 series GPU lineup. The only question is what form that answer will take.