GeForce RTX 3090 Ti And 3070 Ti Alleged Launch Details Bring Good And Bad News
It's been around two months since NVIDIA teased a new flagship graphics card at CES, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, so where the heck is it? Last we heard from NVIDIA is that it would be in touch when it has more information to share. Officially, there's nothing new to offer up. Unofficially, however, the new flagship is slated to launch near the end of this month.
We're still left with only crumbs for details. NVIDIA SVP Jeff Fisher displayed the card in the flesh at CES, and at the time noted it would "crank out 40 TFLOPs for shaders, 78 TFLOPs for ray tracing, and a whopping 320 TFLOPs of AI muscle." It will also flex 24GB of 21Gbps GDDR6 memory.
All of those are upgrades over the GeForce RTX 3090 (it has the same amount of memory, but at 19.5Gbps). NVIDIA said it would provide more details at the end of January, but then the month disappeared into the rear view mirror without an update.
Meanwhile, a rumor cropped up suggesting NVIDIA had told its add-in board (AIB) partners to press pause on producing custom models of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This led to speculation that perhaps NVIDIA needed more time to massage the BIOS and/or tweak the hardware requirements for custom printed circuit boards (PCBs) to handle the added power.
We have no clue if any of that is true. However, we may find out soon—according to a rumor at Chiphell, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will release on March 29, which is just over three weeks from now. That's certainly plausible, though we'll have to wait and see if it's ultimately true.
The same source claims NVIDIA has now cancelled another planned upgrade to its existing Ampere stack, and specifically a version of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB of memory. That's twice as much memory as the existing GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. It was never clear if any other specs would change as well, such as at the number of CUDA cores or clock speeds.
Both ASUS and Gigabyte had registered a handful of upgraded GeForce RTX 3070 Ti cards with the Economic Eurasian Commission (EEC) website, seemingly confirming the card did exist at some point. Whether it still does or if the latest Ampere rumors are accurate, time will tell.
