Rumor mill: There have been plenty of rumors about potential "Ti" versions of Nvidia's Ampere series, mostly regarding the RTX 3060 Ti. The company hasn't confirmed any Ti cards yet, but that hasn't stopped new claims arriving, the latest of which points toward an RTX 3080 Ti that sounds quite intriguing, and could rival AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Hong Kong-based hardware site HKEPC writes that the RTX 3080 Ti will cost the same $999 as the upcoming flagship Radeon RX 6000 card, which, according to AMD, ties with or beats the Nvidia RTX 3090 at 4K and outperforms it at lower resolutions, all while being at least $500 cheaper.

The alleged RTX 3080 Ti could give people pause before opting for AMD's most expensive RDNA 2-based product. Team green's card is said to be a cut-down version of the RTX 3090, featuring the same 10,496 CUDA cores, 328 Tensor cores, 82 RT cores, and GA102 GPU, the latter of which is also found in the RTX 3080.

Some downgrades from the RTX 3090 could be a memory reduction from 24GB of GDDR6X to 20GB of GDDR6X, but clocked at the same 19.5 Gbps. Interestingly, there were rumors of a 20GB version of the RTX 3080, but a report last month claimed that card and a 16GB RTX 3070 had been canceled by Nvidia.

Elsewhere, the RTX 3080 Ti could use a 320-bit memory bus rather than the 384-bit interface found in the RTX 3090 and have a slower bandwidth---760 GBps vs. 936 GBps. It will lack it's big brother's NVLink, though the 320W TDP remains.

The RTX 3080 Ti is rumored to launch sometime during January 2021, around one month after the Radeon RX 6900 XT's December 8 release date. Nvidia says 3080/3090 shortages will last until next year, so a new card could help the situation, assuming it doesn't also get snapped up in bulk by bots.

If a previous claim is to be believed, the RTX 3080 Ti won't be the first Ampere Ti card---an RTX 3060 Ti will supposedly drop on December 2.