It’s hard to believe it’s been almost nine months since Nvidia unveiled their first Ampere graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3080. Though I suppose it might also have felt like an eternity for those of you who have been trying to buy one for the past nine months.
The RTX 3080 was a truly exciting product, offering 20% better performance over the much more expensive RTX 2080 Ti ($700 vs $1200). Although many were lucky enough to grab one, it was always hard to get, and once the cryptomining boom hit again, tracking one down at the MSRP has been virtually impossible.
Over the course of the following weeks and months we’ve also received the fully unlocked version of the GA102 silicon called the RTX 3090 (which costs a cool $1500 MSRP) — though that one never made much sense for gamers — the RTX 3070, which is based on a nearly 40% smaller GA104 die, meaning it’s possible for Nvidia to get more of these dies out of a wafer. Also sharing the GA104 die is the RTX 3060 Ti, probably the hardest to find of all the Ampere-based graphics cards since Nvidia has been prioritizing the higher margin RTX 3070 thanks to seemingly strong yields.
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