The Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, designed for the most demanding gamers, is now available. We’re going to require a more powerful power supply.
Finally, after a few months of waiting, Nvidia has announced the RTX 3090 Ti, the company’s next ultra-enthusiast level graphics card from the green team. We can confirm to the fact that it is “a monster of a GPU,” as its makers describe it, after witnessing what third-party manufacturers have done to the entire GA102 GPU inside to keep it cool.
However, while it is quite comparable to the GeForce RTX 3090 in many aspects, the RTX 3090Ti boasts an increase of 2.4% in CUDA Cores, from 10,496 to 10,752, making it somewhat more powerful. There will be an increase in ray tracing and machine learning performance as a result of the addition of two additional RT Cores and eight additional Tensor Cores.
This card’s performance is mostly driven by its greater clock speeds, rather than by its graphics processing unit. The RTX 3090 Ti operates at a base frequency of 1,560MHz and has the ability to boost to 1,860MHz by default. Third-party models that are larger in size, such as the Colorful iGame Neptune (a GPU with its own liquid cooling loop connected), will see an additional 45MHz boost.
We’ve been testing the Asus TUF RTX 3090 Ti OC card, which is capable of running at 1,950MHz when in OC Mode. It has, however, been running much quicker in our tests, reaching an average of 1,990MHz in our 4K Metro Exodus torture test, which is a significant improvement. Furthermore, at 1080p, the Asus card will consistently outperform the 2GHz threshold.
On top of that, the 24GB of GDDR6X memory on the RTX 3090 Ti will run at 21Gbps, which is an improvement over the 19.5Gbps memory on the previous-generation RTX 3090.
However, these performance gains are energy-intensive, and every RTX 3090 Ti model we’ve heard of from Colorful consumes an astonishing 480W. Despite the fact that units from other manufacturers may be as high as 450W. A significant jump up over the RTX 3090’s 350W power consumption, and it will typically require an 850W power supply in order to function properly, however Asus recommends a 1,000W power supply as a preferred specification.
The higher-end OC versions can generate up to 510W at times, which results in a card that consumes an astonishing amount of power. Consequently, larger cooling, including liquid coolers, are typical across the RTX 3090 Ti lineup that we’ve seen thus far in our testing. Our test sample has reached a maximum power of 492W, which indicates that it is still somewhat thirsty.
Considering all of the added heat and material, are the performance improvements worth it? After all, it would be insane to make a 29–46 percent increase in power draw without seeing any significant benefit, wouldn’t it? In terms of gaming performance, however, the RTX 3090 Ti TUF delivers only a 5 – 13 percent improvement over the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. And keep in mind that this is with an overclocked version.
This explains why Nvidia has been so eager to promote the card’s professional applications, despite the fact that it is still being marketed as a GeForce card rather than a Titan. Throw it at some Blender rendering and it will still perform admirably in comparison to other RTX 30-series cards, but in terms of game performance, it is a case of diminishing returns.
| RTX 3090 Ti | RTX 3090 | |
| GPU | GA102-350 | GA102-300 |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere |
| CUDA Cores | 10,752 | 10,496 |
| Tensor Cores | 336 | 328 |
| RT Cores | 84 | 82 |
| Base clock | 1,560 | 1,395 |
| Boost clock | 1,860 | 1,695 |
| Memory capacity | 24GB | 24GB |
| Memory speed | 21Gbps | 19.5Gbps |
| TDP | 450W | 350W |
In the United Kingdom, the RTX 3090 Ti is available for roughly £1,879, with high-end, liquid-cooled models fetching upwards of £2,050, if not higher. That is broadly in line with the $1,999 price tag that had previously been speculated in the United States, but larger variants will likely sell for significantly more.
Although it appears to be priced well below the $4,000 asking price that was initially postulated by early ads, such asking prices were truly astonishing at the time. Having said that, we do know that the cost from at least one vendor has decreased by approximately $800 in the last couple of weeks, indicating that the launch price for third-party cards would have been far higher at one point in the past.
Although it’s not outrageously expensive for an RTX 30-series card in the same year that we expect Nvidia (and AMD) to release a new GPU generation, it’s still a lot of money. Of course, everything is subject to change, but this may be Ampere’s final high-performance, high-power hurrah before the end of the world.
