MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X 12G, 12GB GDDR6X, HDMI, 3x DP (V389-057R)

There's no doubt about it; we like the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in general, and the MSI SUPRIM X even better. Really, MSI has a fabulous card here at hand with the SUPRIM X. Despite the prophetic naming; it's a product that oozes quality at that hardware level; the hardware really is that good. The looks are great; that aluminum backplate, newly designed cooler, and dual BIOS, is it worth a price premium? We doubt that a little, to be honest, especially over the reference FE design (which is really good). But this is over-engineering at its best. Remember that all cards are more or less in that same performance bracket, resulting in a meager 4~5% additional performance seen over the FE edition, for this, all amped and beefed up product. Make no mistake, it's love and fantastic, but is it worth the highest price premium? We doubt that. In general, I think anyone would agree with me; we all would love to own a 3080 Ti. This is a very well-balanced enthusiast-class graphics card. Basically, it's almost a 3090 with half the memory and a few configuration tweaks. I am totally fine with the 12GB memory btw; the 24 GB on the 3090 is impressive but far-fetched and made the product extra expensive. 12GB is a notably well-balanced value in the year 2021. Performance-wise NVIDIA carved out something beautiful. You will be way up there in the highest performance regions, and even at Ultra HD, you can enable Raytracing with the combination of DLSS where applicable. Competition-wise, overall, AMD will still win in the lower resolutions thanks to their massive L3 buffer. However, in more demanding scenarios, NVIDIA takes the lead in rasterized shading performance when the resolution goes up when it comes to brute force muscle power in more demanding scenarios. NVIDIA also has faster Raytracing performance and, of course, the implementation of DLSS that will support that raytracing even further in performance. For raytracing, it's still hard to find Games with raytraced properly reflections, but that's what you should be after, and the numbers will grow in the future. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti performs well on all fronts, performance, cooling, and acoustics as an overall package of hard- and software. MSI did a spectacular job here, but in the end, that choice rests at the end-user level availability and ... pricing. If pricing remains under control at etailers, this card will be a hit—what a card. If you can find it at the right price, highly recommended.

NVIDIA has announced a $1200 price point for RTX 3080 Ti, which matches the RTX 2080 Ti MSRP. In reality, I doubt we'll see cards retail for anything close to that. To put things into perspective: The RTX 3090 goes for $2900 right now, RTX 3080 for $1500, RX 6800 XT for $1700, and RX 6900 XT for $2100. NVIDIA confirmed to us that the RTX 3080 Ti comes with the LHR (low-hash-rate) mining performance limiter, which hopefully won't be circumvented this time, so that at least gamers can get those cards. It won't make much of a difference for pricing, though. The general market demand is simply too high and supply is too low. MSI hasn't provided any pricing to us yet. I'm fairly certain there will be a serious price increase over the NVIDIA baseline price. It is justified to some extent, no doubt. You're getting a large factory OC, a much better cooler, dual BIOS, etc. I still feel like I wouldn't spend more than $100 extra for these features, which is why I'm estimating $2100 as a realistic market price. You really have to look at current pricing, though. If you can find RTX 3080 Ti at similar price levels as the RX 6900 XT, definitely go for the 3080 Ti. It has higher overall performance,and better RT performance, albeit with higher power draw. The RTX 3080 could be an interesting option if the price gap is bigger than the 10% performance gap between the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080. Last but not least, possibly the strongest competition for GeForce and for the PC gaming market overall comes from game consoles, which can be found for well under $1000 and will play all the new games, too; perhaps with slightly worse graphics, but the money saved can buy you a 4K TV and a lot of games.