At CES this year Nvidia dropped a “one more thing” teaser at the end of its keynote address, revealing a “monster” GPU, the RTX 3090 Ti. The unveiling didn’t offer much in the way of specs aside from its 40 Teraflops of shader performance, and the fact that it had 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21Gb/s, which was already predicted. The presentation ended with the host saying, “tune in later this month for more details,” and now we have some: it’s probably delayed, like everything else that has chips, delivers fun, or is related to gaming in some way.
According to TweakTown, Nvidia has told its Add-in Board (AIB) partners to “pause production” on the company’s new flagship GPU, but didn’t give the companies a reason why it was requesting this drastic action. Other sites followed up on this tip and were able to discern the pause is related to the card’s “BIOS and hardware,” which is equally vague and not very helpful.
Videocardz reports that there was supposed to be some kind of embargo on information lifting last week, which was cancelled, lending credence to the rumors. Apparently the card was supposed to launch on January 27th, though Nvidia never divulged an official date, and it still hasn’t officially revealed all of its specifications, despite the card theoretically launching soon.
In its report, Videocardz writes that the card is rumored to have a ridiculous 450W TDP, which is higher than any GPU in history, and 100w more than the company’s previous flagship card, the RTX 3090. In previous years Nvidia never offered a GPU with a TDP higher than 250W, which it had seemingly established as a ceiling for a desktop graphics card. But with Ampere, it released the hounds, and rumors point to the company going even further with its upcoming Ada Lovelace GPUs, which are rumored to be 500W+ GPUs. AMD’s next-gen GPUs are rumored to be similarly power-hungry.
Equally ridiculous will be its pricing, which Nvidia is yet to reveal, though $1,999 doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. Naturally, this will translate into a $3,000 street price, or higher, assuming anyone can actually buy one. However, Nvidia is being cagey about pricing these days, as it still hasn’t released an official price for the RTX 3080 12GB, which launched “silently” last week. Nvidia’s partners sent cards to reviewers ahead of the launch, but according to Hardware Unboxed, Nvidia never sent reviewers a driver to use, so they weren’t any reviews ready on launch day. Once the Hardware Unboxed team downloaded the publicly available driver and posted their review, they labeled the card the “shameless cash grab” version of the 3080.
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