UNIT · NVIDIA · GPU
12 GB VRAMenthusiastReviewed November 2026

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

No editorial image yet — generic vendor mark shown. Credentials in spec table below.

Ampere flagship-minus-one. 12 GB GDDR6X at 912 GB/s — closer to the 3090 in raw bandwidth than to the 3080. Fits 13B Q4 with full context, 32B Q4 with offload. The 'budget 3090' for operators willing to give up 12 GB of VRAM headroom for a meaningful price cut.

Released 2021·Launch MSRP $1,199 (2021) · Now sells well below its launch price on the used market.·912 GB/s memory bandwidth
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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
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RUNLOCALAI SCORE
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456/ 1000
CC-tier
Estimated
Throughput
317/ 500
VRAM-fit
110/ 200
Ecosystem
200/ 200
Efficiency
25/ 100

Sub-scores sum to 652 / 1000. Headline = 652 × 0.70 (Estimated-confidence discount) = 456. This is an algorithmic performance-tier score — distinct from, and often lower than, the editorial “Our verdict” below, which weighs value and real-world fit (especially for hardware we haven’t measured yet). How scoring works →

Extrapolated from 912 GB/s bandwidth — 109.4 tok/s estimated. No measured benchmarks yet.

WORKLOAD FIT
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Plain-English: Comfortable at 14B and below — snappy enough for a coding agent; vision models supported.

7B chat✓
Comfortable
14B chat✓
Comfortable
32B chat✗
Doesn't fit
70B chat✗
Doesn't fit
Coding agent✓
Comfortable
Vision (≤8B VLM)✓
Comfortable
Long context (32K)~
Tight
✓Comfortable — fits with headroom
~Tight — works, no slack
△Marginal — needs aggressive quant
✗Doesn't fit usefully

Verdicts extrapolated from catalog VRAM + bandwidth + ecosystem flags. Hover any chip for the rationale. Want measured numbers? Submit your own run with runlocalai-bench --submit.

BLK · OVERVIEW

Overview

Ampere flagship-minus-one. 12 GB GDDR6X at 912 GB/s — closer to the 3090 in raw bandwidth than to the 3080. Fits 13B Q4 with full context, 32B Q4 with offload. The 'budget 3090' for operators willing to give up 12 GB of VRAM headroom for a meaningful price cut.

Retailers we'd check:Amazon

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BLK · SPECS

Specs

VRAM12 GB
Power draw (peak)350 W
Released2021
MSRP$1199
Backends
CUDA
Vulkan

Models that fit

Open-weight models small enough to run on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with usable context.

all-MiniLM-L6-v2
0.022B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Nomic Embed Text v1.5
0.137B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Kokoro 82M
0.082B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
BGE Large EN v1.5
0.335B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
Qwen 3 0.6B
0.6B · qwen · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
all-mpnet-base-v2
0.109B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
XTTS v2
0.46B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet
BGE Reranker v2 M3
0.57B · other · fits by VRAM, no benchmark yet

Frequently asked

What models can NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti run?

With 12GB VRAM, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti runs models up to 14B in 4-bit, or 7B at higher quantizations. See the model list below for tested combinations.

Does NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti support CUDA?

Yes — NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is an NVIDIA card with full CUDA support, the most mature local-AI backend. llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, and ExLlamaV2 all run natively.

How much does NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cost?

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti launched at an MSRP of $1,199 in 2021. Now sells well below its launch price on the used market. Retail prices change often, so check the current price with a retailer before you buy.

Where next?

Buyer guides
Troubleshooting

Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify hardware specifications.