The work establishes fundamental limits with respect to rate, reliability and computational complexity, for a general setting of outage-limited MIMO communications. In the high-SNR regime, the limits are optimized over all encoders, all decoders, and all complexity regulating policies. The work then proceeds to explicitly identify encoder-decoder designs and policies, that meet this optimal tradeoff. In practice, the limits aim to meaningfully quantify different pertinent measures, such as the optimal rate-reliability capabilities per unit complexity and power, the optimal diversity gains per complexity costs, or the optimal number of numerical operations (i.e., flops) per bit. Finally the tradeoff's simple nature, renders it useful for insightful comparison of the rate-reliability-complexity capabilities for different encoders-decoders.