NVIDIA Sort Of Breaks Silence On Its Flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti
Back at CES, NVIDIA announced a flurry of new mobile and desktop GPUs, including a new flagship SKU—the mighty GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. There was not a whole lot of information to share at the time, other than a few TFLOPs numbers and the promise to share more details by the end of the month. It's been about a month and a half since then, so where is the card? NVIDIA provided an update of sorts.
That's the good news. The bad news? NVIDIA's update amounts to saying it doesn't really have any further details to offer up right now, and will let everyone know when it does. Whenever that might is still anyone's guess.
"We don't currently have more info to share on the RTX 3090 Ti, but we'll be in touch when we do," a spokesperson at NVIDIA told The Verge.
Barring any new info, let's recap what we do know at this point. The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is going to be a beastly GPU when it does arrive. NVIDIA previously confirmed it will "crank out 40 TFLOPs for shaders, 78 TFLOPs for ray tracing, and a whopping 320 TFLOPs of AI muscle."
Compute throughput is not the end-all-be-all, but those figures do give us something to compare against. The regular GeForce RTX 3090 offers up 35.6 TFLOPs in FP32, 69 TFLOPs for ray tracing, and 285 TFLOPs for Tensor compute chores. So we're looking at some meaty increases in those areas on the eventual Ti model.
Less reliable are the leaks and rumors. One of those rumors is that NVIDIA told its add-in board (AIB) partners to press pause on producing custom models. If that's true (and we don't know if it is), it could be so NVIDIA can tweak the hardware requirements for custom printed circuit boards (PCBs) and/or fine tune the BIOS. But only NVIDIA and it's partners know for sure.
As for pricing, nothing is official right now. For reference, the GeForce RTX 3090 has a $1,499 MSRP, and of course sells for a lot more on the street (because all GPUs do right now). Some early retail listings in other countries show custom GeForce RTX 3090 Ti models carrying price tags that convert to around $4,000 in US currency.
We'd be shocked if any MSRPs were actually that high, but given the GPU situation right now, actual selling prices by marketplace hawkers and scalpers will undoubtedly be high. Hopefully we'll know more soon. In the meantime, we can only wait for NVIDIA to offer up more details.
