Aside from cryptocurrency mining, GPU shortages, and Covid-19, what else does the year 2021 elicit from your memory? The launch of the RTX 3080 Ti, of course! This high-end card launched with nearly as many CUDA cores, RT cores, and Tensor cores as the RTX 3090 for a little less money, but it had one downside: less VRAM. Well, the RTX 3080 Ti that actually launched did anyways. For another RTX 3080 Ti was made… the RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB.
Want proof? An engineering sample of the RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB was just listed for sale on eBay for $2,000 by user malumarbor, as spotted by our pals at Tom’s Hardware.
You can see the 10 memory chips on the rear of the PCB denoting the bump to 20 GB. The standard RTX 3080 Ti only had 12 GB of memory, with no memory chips required on the reverse side of the PCB. There’s also a sticker on the side that reads: “Not for sale, for development only”.
It’s not clear if the 20 GB card has actually sold or not, or if the seller received another offer elsewhere, as the listing merely ended. Head to the eBay listing and hit ‘see original listing’ for all the details.
The RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB is the graphics card we should have received in 2021. It was alleged with various specs, even as many cores as the RTX 3090 at one point, but importantly was said to feature 20 GB of GDDR6X memory—only 4 GB short of the RTX 3090. Yet something changed; Nvidia had a change of heart, deciding late in the game to ditch the 20 GB config.
This change came late in the day, as evidenced by one user noticing their RTX 3090 GPU has the code for the RTX 3080 Ti etched onto it and subsequently crossed out. Later, it was revealed that some cryptocurrency miners in Russia got their hands on the 20 GB card—the increase in memory making it a sweet deal for Ethereum mining that was big at the time.
So, it’s no surprise to see an RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB show up for sale. This card very nearly ended up on general sale. Though even if you did purchase this very card, which its seller claims is “fully functional and in mint condition”, you wouldn’t likely get very far. Nvidia never released official drivers for it.
The seller notes, “For sale is a rare RTX 3080 Ti FE developer/engineering sample card. The card is a normal 3080 Ti, except that it has 20 GB of VRAM instead of 12 GB.
“Please note, in order to use the card for gaming/3D workloads you must use a third party driver like NVIDIA-patcher as the official NVIDIA driver does not support this card.”
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So, it’s a bit of a paperweight, but a very cool paperweight. I’m sure GPU collectors are keen to get their hands on it, though $2,000 is a lot of money for a graphics card from a tumultuous and overpriced generation.
A similar tale to this one, Nvidia was rumoured to launch an RTX 4090 Ti back in 2023. This card similarly never came, though one user did find one in a bin. Yep, Nvidia’s most powerful graphics card of a GeForce generation thrown into the trash. Where is the humanity?! Alas, the card didn’t quite manage to outperform its non-Ti variant, though it never had proper drivers made for it, either.
So, next time you dream up some wild RTX 5090 Ti Super…. that graphics card might exist, it might even come out, though it just as likely will get canned before its time.