It appears that the long-awaited launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has been delayed again until at least mid-May.

The report comes from ITHome, which claims that Nvidia announced this delay in an internal memo. According to the internal memo, the release should be "around mid-May."

The next RTX 3080 Ti was initially rumored as a 20GB upgrade version of the RTX 3080. Since then, the stock keeping unit (SKU) has included a revision of the specs, and the card now has 12GB of memory. The memory reduction is likely due to the ongoing memory and chip shortages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The RTX 3080 Ti may be released at the same time as the long-awaited RTX 3070 Ti, as the release is rumored to be two months away.

Speaking of memory, recent rumors have also indicated that the RTX 3080 Ti will have fewer Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) cores than previous leaks had said. The manufacturer reportedly plans to include 10,240 cores in the upcoming GPU, which is 256 cores less than what was originally expected.

Some leaked information also suggests that Nvidia intends to limit the RTX 3080 Ti's crypto mining potential in order to discourage miners from purchasing it in large quantities. This will help alleviate the inventory of ordinary consumers who are already struggling to find a place to buy RTX 3080s.

The company previously used a similar approach when it launched the RTX 3060, with a hash rate limiter that allowed the card's firmware to detect all kinds of mathematical hashing operations commonly used in cryptocurrency mining. Unfortunately, Nvidia soon thereafter accidentally unlocked it for Ethereum mining via a software update.

According to HKEPC, the RTX 3080 Ti is expected to be priced around $999, which is in between the RTX 3080 ($699) and RTX 3090 ($1499). The graphics card was initially rumored to arrive in December 2020, but was further delayed to January and February. Subsequent reports have stated that the launch has been postponed "indefinitely". A report by ChannelGate earlier this month predicted that the RTX 3080 Ti would hit store shelves in mid-April.

It is now rumored to be available less than two months later, but given the high demand and manufacturing hurdles caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, availability will remain difficult.