If you thought you had any chance of picking up one of Nvidia's upcoming RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards at a fair price, good for you. That's some serious optimism. The pragmatic side of you may wish to acknowledge that the 3080 Ti is likely to sell out immediately, and may not even make it to digital store shelves at all. Pre-buys of the card have allegedly already reached as high as $3,500, making the prospect of reasonable gamers affording one almost non existent, even if stock can be found.
Redditor FaisalKhatib spotted one retailer in the United Arab Emirates which sold a few MSI RTX 3080 Ti Suprim X graphics cards ahead of release at that ridiculous price. That's over $1,000 more than the already ridiculous price that some retailers have been quoting pre-release.
What's extra nuts about this is that the card hasn't even been officially announced yet. Nvidia hasn't said a thing about the 3080 Ti, and yes it's not only been leaked, the card is in retailers and presumably some buyers have already picked up some of these cards and are gaming with them right now. Drivers won't be well optimized though, which might make the experience pretty lacklustre.
The official price of the 3080 Ti is expected to be around $1,300, which is a lot, but it's effectively a slightly cut back RTX 3090, so not too surprising. The fact that its over 2.5x that in the wild is sad, but unsurprising considering the terrible climate for GPU buying at the moment.