Everyone is trying to get their hands on an RTX 3080 these days but it appears that the rush could cover up some issues, such as manufacturers releasing models that intentionally perform worse than the Founders Edition.
Demand for GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards these days is heavily outweighing the supply which is resulting in shortages with pretty much every manufacturer. As a result, consumers are jumping at any chance to buy any version of the GPU but it would be wise to still go through the fine print before committing your money to a certain model.
Zotac's Geforce RTX 3080 Trinity model is a good example of what the buyers need to be aware of. Potential customers expressed their confusion and wariness of the card's performance which is said to be one to three per cent behind Founders Edition of RTX 3080 on Zotac's subreddit but it's still priced the same .
The person who posted the thread also expressed concern over the fact that other similarly priced cards will be one to eight per cent ahead of FE with factory overclocks which could mean up to 11 per cent disparity between them and RTX 3080 Trinity.
While we normally expected to see a PR response that explains next to nothing, Zotac's rep answered with a rather interesting statement - the card is designed to perform worse than FE so Zotac could differentiate it from the higher end models they are planning to put out.
According to another comment from the same rep , there is a possibility of a future BIOS update where the thermal limits would be lightened, which could result in better performance, but there is no way to confirm it at this time until the response from Zotac HQ in Hong Kong comes back.
Nvidia
In other words, it currently looks like RTX 3080 Trinity performance is gimped so the aforementioned "higher end" models can look better on paper but an official statement from Zotac is probably coming soon which could shed more light on the situation.
