The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti doesn't officially exist yet, but that's about to change real soon if the photos taken by Facebook user Lok Lok are legitimate.

The photo embedded below shows a pallet of MSI GPUs being shipped to Los Angeles, with one of the boxes bearing a particularly attractive label: "GEFORCE RTX 3080 TI VENTUS 3X 12GB OC."

Other photos show a stock stash of shipped GeForce RTX 3090s, a Radeon RX 580 Armor 8G OC, and a GT 710 2GD3 LP GPU. The latter two are considerably less powerful than the ultra-popular RTX 30 GPU, but with all graphics cards in short supply and selling at such inflated prices, any kind of additional inventory is welcome.

If this image is all there is to it and not an elaborate prank, it confirms recent reports that Nvidia has lowered the power of the RTX 3080 Ti. The card was initially said to have 20GB of RAM, but the EEC filing for the Gigabyte version of the card and now MSI's shipping documents clearly state that it only has 12GB of RAM.

To be clear, the card is not inferior in any way. The latest rumors suggest that the card will have 10,240 CUDA cores, 80 RT cores, and 320 Tensor cores; the 12GB of memory will likely be GDDR6X clocked at 19Gbps, if less than originally expected. In short, somewhere between the $499 base RTX 3080 and the $1,499 RTX 3090 should offer some pretty phenomenal performance. Rumor has it that the RTX 3080 Ti will compete with AMD's Radeon 6900XT for around $999.

Of course, all of the above suggested retail prices are somewhat wishful thinking at this point. Demand is such that the cards sell out almost as soon as they become available, and the GPUs are fetching enormous high prices on the used market. Even the previous generation RTX 20 cards are fetching surprisingly high prices, in part due to their appeal to cryptocurrency miners.

Nvidia admits that supply problems are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, but it is rumored that the company will at least take steps to make the RTX 3080 Ti less attractive to crypto miners by introducing a hash rate limiter similar to that seen on the recent RTX 3060 It is rumored that the RTX 3080 Ti will take steps to make it less attractive to crypto miners. If the hash rate limiter cannot be circumvented as in the 3060, it would be a welcome step for users who want to use their graphics cards for their intended gaming purposes.

Although not officially announced, earlier rumors indicated that the RTX 3080 Ti would be available in May. If the card is already part of a shipment for LA, that would make it much more likely.