Rare GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition with 20GB of VRAM spotted

A rare engineering sample of a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition GPU with 20GB of VRAM was recently sold on eBay for $1,999.99. This is one of those big "what if" releases for NVIDIA, as the GeForce RTX 4080 Ti was a mid-generation launch designed to offer GeForce RTX 3090 gaming performance at a more affordable price point.

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Ahead of the card's debut, several reports and rumors of GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20GB graphics cards from companies like GIGABYTE and ASUS made their way to specific markets like Russia. There was also the case of an MSI SUPRIM X variant of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20GB that went up for sale in Australia in 2023.

The sale of this Founders Edition model with 20GB of GDDR6X memory adds weight to the idea that NVIDIA changed the memory configuration of this graphics card at the eleventh hour. And there are, in fact, a number of these rare GPUs out in the wild.

The eBay listing includes some photos of the rare GPU, which has a bright green "not for sale, development only" sticker on the underside of the card. The seller also notes that because the card was never officially released, it's not officially supported by NVIDIA drivers, which means the buyer would need to use a third-party driver to game with it.

As seen in our full review of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card that went live in June 2021, the card that made its way to retail shelves featured 12GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit memory interface with an impressive 912 GB/sec of bandwidth. It was a GeForce RTX 3090 with half of the VRAM.

There's no official word on why the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20GB was scrapped at the last minute in favor of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB version we got.