Razer leaks GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti GPUs — and they look powerful

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti are almost certainly coming soon. If you don't believe us, then you can believe Razer. The popular PC gaming company recently leaked both GPUs in pre-order listings for its gaming desktops. The 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti look a little more powerful than the 3070 and 3080, respectively. The only question is: When the GPUs debut, will anyone actually be able to find them?

Information comes from sharp-eyed Twitter user harukaze5719, with additional reporting from tech news site HotHardware. harukaze5719, a Korean tech enthusiast, was browsing Tmall: the official vendor for Razer PCs in China. There, he found options for Razer desktops configured with either the 3080 Ti or the 3070 Ti, despite the fact that Nvidia has not officially announced either card yet.

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If you've been following Nvidia news for a while, this information probably won't shock you. Nvidia has teased the 3070 Ti for almost a year, while the 3080 Ti has had similar online retailer leaks over the past few weeks. The company may officially reveal the cards as early as May 31, at a Computex keynote talk. It's not at all impossible that PC manufacturers have already started installing these GPUs, and are ready to sell the machines.

As for the cards themselves, the Razer listing seems to back up what other sources have said. The 3080 Ti will have 10,240 CUDA cores, making it potentially more powerful than the base 3080, while the 3070 Ti will have 6,144 CUDA cores, making it potentially more powerful than the base 3070. (To oversimplify a much more complicated issue, compute unified device architecture, or CUDA, cores help GPUs process data more efficiently. A system with more CUDA cores is generally more powerful than a system with fewer.)

Naturally, raw power isn't always indicative of performance, and we'll have to try them out for ourselves. But the 3080 Ti, in particular, sounds quite powerful, considering that the top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU has 10,496 CUDA cores. That's not a huge difference.

The one downside to this whole arrangement is that we don't expect the 3080 Ti or 3070 Ti to be any more widely available than their base models. The global semiconductor shortage has made GPUs into luxury goods for the time being, and the two new GPUs will need semiconductors, just the same as any other graphics card on the market. As such, expect limited availability, high prices and a competitive buying process.

On the other hand, you can simply buy prebuilt machines, such as the Razer desktops mentioned in this story. While prebuilt gaming PCs are often more expensive and less specialized than custom-built models, major manufacturers have a better pipeline for GPUs than the average consumer. You can also hold off until the semiconductor shortage abates, but that might take another year or more.