This Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is £1049 – right at the UK RRP

The downwards march in graphics card prices continues – oh, how I’ve longed to write those words! After posting a deal that had the Nvidia Founders Edition RTX 3080 Ti at its UK RRP of £1049 last week, third-party cards are now reaching the same levels. Right now, you can pick up a beefy KFA2 OC card for the same price, after a £50 discount at Overclockers.

If you’d prefer the better value RTX 3080, then there’s also been movement – after appearing for £860 seven days ago, the cheapest card is now this Zotac Trinity OC model for £810. That’s still a hefty chunk of change for a graphics card – and above the original RRP of £650 – but it’s a damned sight better than the £1000+ these GPUs have retailed at for months.

So which is the better buy? Looking at the RPS reviews of the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 by the effervescent Katharine, there’s not a massive performance gulf between the two cards – just a few frames per second in most games. Over at Digital Foundry, we got similar results, with the 3080 Ti normally being between nine to 13% faster than the vanilla 3080 in most games, and slightly better in RT titles.

Given that the Ti costs around 30% more here, the 3080 Ti only really makes sense if you can make use of its extra VRAM – eg you’re doing 4K video exports and the like – and you also want the fastest graphics card at round about £1000.

The Ti model also seems more power-hungry (and hotter as a result). Compared to the RTX 3090, the 3080 Ti is about 98% as fast, but then again that card makes anything look like a good deal!

So – hope this was helpful. I think both deals are reasonable in their own right, but hopefully I’ll be able to report back in another few weeks or months with even better prices, as Nvidia’s RTX 40-series cards (and AMD’s rumored RX 6000 refresh) edge closer to release. Stay tuned!