Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Launched at $1,999

Since its initial announcement, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has taken a more than two-month detour, but it’s finally here after a long journey. It’s possible that the RTX 3090 Ti, which currently ranks first in our GPU benchmarks, will soon be the best graphics card for prosumer content creators who don’t want to upgrade to the Nvidia A-series offerings because of its extreme performance (formerly Quadro). Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti has been officially launched for $1999. We are excited to see the price to performance ratio.

So, when will we see a review? Due to Nvidia’s decision not to seed reviewers with its Founders Edition, we have yet to receive our sample. Once we receive our AIC partner card, we’ll post a full review with the usual benchmarks, including some additional proviso testing in content-creation workloads. When it comes to gaming performance, you can take the GeForce RTX 3090 and bump it up by about 10% (Nvidia claims it’s 9% faster overall), and you’ll end up with the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Launched at $1,999

Because of the severe GPU shortages and skyrocketing GPU prices over the last 18 months, the last line in the table above should be regarded with a grain of salt. Even though we’ve seen a significant drop in graphics card prices over the past few months, we’re not yet out of the woods.

Except for the RTX 3080 (10GB), which is still floating at closer to double the MSRP, our latest data for the US uses mid-March eBay GPU prices to put most of these extreme GPUs at 30–50 percent over MSRP. While Nvidia hasn’t released an exact price for the RTX 3090 Ti, it’s possible that it will fall somewhere in the range of Nvidia’s theoretical starting point — similar to how Nvidia’s 3080 Ti was only 30 percent over MSRP because it was priced over 70 percent above its predecessor.

Moving past the elephant in the room, there are a few other things to keep an eye on. According to credible rumors, Nvidia’s decision to delay the 3090 Ti’s release by two months was largely due to the fact that the memory is expected to clock at 21Gbps. A fully operational GA102 chip, with 84 streaming multiprocessors (SMs) and more than 10,000 CUDA cores, is also used in the GPU.

Nevertheless, there’s a big catch: The TBP (Total Board Power) rating of the RTX 3090 Ti is 450W, which is 100W higher than the ratings of the 3090 and 3080 Ti cards. Given the increased boost clock and memory speed, this isn’t a huge surprise: it’s about a 30% increase in power consumption.

In other words, Nvidia is pushing the voltage/frequency curve all the way to the right, maximizing performance at the expense of increased power consumption. This could be a preview of the Ada / RTX 40-series graphics cards, given the recent Nvidia Hopper H100 reveal.

What can you expect in terms of increased power, pricing, core counts, and clock speeds? ‘ There is no card in our possession at this time, but we have all the other cards’ benchmarks to compare it to. Overall, the RTX 3090 outperformed the RTX 3080 Ti by only 2.4 percent, with a slightly larger advantage of 3.0 percent if we concentrate solely on 4K gaming performance.

Even when we used our DXR benchmark suite to test ray tracing games, the 3090 was only 2.9% faster than the 3080 Ti. The RTX 3090 leads the RTX 3080 by 16 percent on average and by 20 percent at 4K, but even with the Core i9-12900K, the current best CPU for gaming, or at least the fastest CPU for gaming, the GA102 seems to be running out of gas.

The RTX 3090 Ti theoretically has 4.4 percent more compute power and 2.6 percent more memory bandwidth than the RTX 3080 Ti, based solely on the specifications. Compared to the RTX 3080, its compute and memory bandwidth are both up 19.5%. There is a strong correlation between the paper specifications and real-world performance in terms of compute and bandwidth. RTX 3090 Ti delivers 12.4% more compute power and 7.7% more bandwidth than its predecessor. As a general rule, we expect that the 3090 Ti will be about 12% faster than the 3090, but the margin of victory will be even smaller if the CPU-limited workload occurs.

Due to the lack of RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition cards being provided to reviewers, it is possible that the card will be overclocked to even higher levels of performance when it is used in comparisons. While it’s unlikely to be more than a 2–4% increase, we can’t help but wonder if the lack of reference card sampling was done in part to improve the custom 3090 Ti cards’ visual appearance. There is still some doubt about their value, bringing Titan RTX pricing back to Titan RTX levels without a few of the extra features of Titan.

Can the RTX 3090 Ti Handle 8K Gaming?

Nvidia is also touting the RTX 3090 Ti’s 8K gaming capabilities in addition to its content creation capabilities. Since the slight performance boost over the 3090 won’t suddenly make 8K more viable, this is a bit absurd.

DLSS Ultra Performance mode (or some other form of upscaling) and the old and lightweight games that are kind enough to support 8K are the only games that will be able to reach higher framerates. There are likely to be many games that can be played with medium detail settings at 30 frames per second.

It’s perfectly fine to buy the RTX 3090 Ti if you have an 8K display and want to connect it to a PC, since it’s clear that you can afford it. It’s not possible to test the RTX 3090 at its maximum quality on an 8K display, but even 4K proves to be too much for the card.

Even if the card is 10% faster than “not fast enough,” that won’t be enough to make or break it, and 8K is still a long way off from becoming mainstream. We think it’s in your best interest, or at least something you’ll appreciate.