Is the RTX 3080 Ti worth buying this holiday season?

The Geforce RTX 3080 Ti is a high-end 4K gaming graphics card that Nvidia introduced back in the summer of 2021. The GPU was recently replaced by the much more capable Ada Lovelace-powered RTX 4080.

Now that the 3080 Ti is a generation old, it has been discounted in several retail stores. The average of the three cheapest in-stock listings on Newegg is $763.

Thus, several gamers are considering the RTX 3080 Ti as a viable alternative to the RTX 4080 and the upcoming RX 7900 XT and the 7900 XT, and they have a valid point.

Let us explore the GPU in detail and discuss whether it makes perfect sense in late 2022.

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The RTX 3080 Ti is not cheap, but the alternatives are more expensive

With Nvidia RTX 30 series GPUs gradually falling in price, it is no surprise that more last-generation GPUs make for sensible choices now. The RTX 3080 Ti fits perfectly into this definition.

On paper, the RTX 3080 Ti is a very powerful card. It comes with the flagship GA102 chip that also powers the RTX 3090 and the 3090 Ti. It also has over 10,000 CUDA cores, 80 ray tracing cores, and 12 GB of GDDR6X memory that is based on a wide 384-bit memory bus.

GPU Name	GA102
CUDA Core Count	10,240
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)	320
Render Output Units (ROPs)	112
Ray Tracing (RT) Core Count	80
Tensor Core Count	320
Video Memory Size	12 GB
Video Memory Type	GDDR6X
Video Memory Bus Width	384 bit
Base Clock Speed	1365 MHz
Boost Clock Speed	1665 MHz
Memory Clock Speed	1188 MHz
MSRP	US$ 1,119

These specs translate very well to video games, and the RTX 3080 Ti can easily handle every modern game at 4K resolution. For most gamers, the base RTX 3080 is more than enough, and the 3080 Ti might seem like an excess.

However, let us look at the alternatives and the competition. The 3080 Ti was recently replaced by the RTX 4080. This card is undoubtedly much superior, but it also comes with a hefty $1,199 price tag, which will scare away most gamers.

The RTX 3080 10 GB and 12 GB models are viable alternatives. However, they are only slightly cheaper. Thus, it makes more sense to opt for the more capable Ti variant. This improved GPU can deliver up to 10% more performance than the base model.

However, AMD offers some steep competition to the 3080 Ti. The RX 6900 XT, which beats the 3080 Ti in almost every game by a slight margin, can be bought for around $700 after AMD cut costs on their RX 6000 series graphics cards.

The RX 6950 XT, which solidifies Team Red's lead over the 3080 Ti, can be bought for around $800 these days.

However, it is worth noting that AMD GPUs have a set of pros and cons. The RX 6000 series cards have significantly weaker ray tracing performance. OpenGL is not up to the snuff with CUDA processing in productivity workloads, and AMD's drivers are a nightmare for some of its users.

In addition, AMD's upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), although good, is not up to par with Nvidia's DLSS.

Thus, for the same price, the 3080 Ti is a safer bet for most gamers. Although the 6900 XT and the 6950 XT are solid graphics cards, they have a few problems.

Team Red is expected to solve most of these problems with their latest RDNA 3 GPUs. Until those graphics cards hit the market, the 3080 Ti seems to be a popular recommendation.