While most of the world is still struggling to get graphics cards at MSRP, NVIDIA saw fit to launch yet another high-tier GPU, this time nearing a $2,000 retail price. The Big Ferocious GPU, or BFGPU as NVIDIA has coined for the RTX 3090 Ti, delivers a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X memory that’s clocked at 21GB/s. It packs 10,752 CUDA cores, 78 RT-, 40 Shader-, and 320 Tensor-TFLOPs of power, and requires an 850W PSU to drive. While the 3090 Ti might be a powerhouse of a GPU, is it even necessary in today’s gaming lineup or should NVIDIA have devoted resources to making more of its affordable graphics cards? Let’s take a closer look at the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti specs and how it stacks up down below.
Should the RTX 3090 Ti even exist at this point in the release cycle?
When NVIDIA updated the RTX 3080 with 12GB of RAM, we thought that the update shouldn’t have even been released. Now, with the introduction of the RTX 3090 Ti, we have to contemplate that very same question again.
Coming in at “60% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti and 55% faster than the TITAN RTX,” the RTX 3090 Ti is a beast of a graphics card for sure. It’s made for “the most demanding gamers, content creators, and data scientists” with its impressive power that dwarfs even the overkill RTX 3090 that NVIDIA launched over a year and a half ago. The 3090 Ti is made to set 4K ray-traced games to maximum settings and play with ease, and also has the ability to run 8K DLSS-accelerated games at 8K 60 according to NVIDIA. However, it’s not as cut and dry as NVIDIA might lead you to believe.
The full spec breakdown comparing the $1,499 RTX 3090 with the $1,999 RTX 3090 Ti shows that there’s not a huge difference between the two. The RTX 3090 Ti packs 10,752 CUDA cores while the RTX 3090 has 10,496, or a difference of 256 CUDA cores. While that might seem like a lot, it’s barely a noticeable number for most setups. The clocks are quite a bit different, with the RTX 3090 Ti coming in at around 0.15GHz faster overall. They both even have the same 24GB GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit interface bus, though it does have a faster clock of 21GB/s which results in a total bandwidth of 1,008GB/s. Outside of that, the only other major difference is the fact that the RTX 3090 Ti can reach 450W instead of 350W, requiring you to have an 850W PSU to drive it. Really though, the extra power of the RTX 3090 Ti seems to come from being able to draw more power from your PSU, and not from any real increase in hardware capabilities, at least according to the spec sheet we were provided.
In all, NVIDIA claims that the RTX 3090 Ti will only really provide around a 9% performance bump over the $500 lesser RTX 3090, which was already quite pricy when it came to GPUs. Will the RTX 3090 Ti be worth its asking price of $1,999, and most certainly higher cost from third-party partners? Only time will tell, and we’re working to get our hands on one to give you our thoughts on the matter as well.
9to5Toys’ take
The RTX 3090 Ti honestly shouldn’t exist, at least, not in my book. Sure it offers better performance, but at what cost? An extra $500? That $500 could nearly buy you AMD’s highest-end Ryzen 9 5950X, or the i9-12900KF. It could also go toward buying ample RAM or storage for your system, which would arguably help out with gaming more than going from the 3090 to the 3090 Ti in most cases. In all, I would have rather seen NVIDIA focus on ramping up production on mid- to high-range GPUs instead of the ultra powerhouse that most will never buy, as the RTX 3090 Ti isn’t aimed toward the average consumer that is struggling to get a graphics card right now.
Will the RTX 3090 Ti be powerful? You bet, there’s no question about that. However, one has to think whether this was the right move for NVIDIA at all. Hopefully, with board partners dropping prices on current graphics cards and more GPUs coming in stock at retailers, we’ll see the return to MSRP sales for cards in the near future as we get closer to the RTX 40-series release.
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