NVIDIA has a new consumer GPU, now coming in at $2000, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This is a massive GPU and is likely the peak Ampere-generation GPU on the market. We have been eagerly awaiting this for months. This is a relatively small bump, but a positive one nonetheless.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB Launched
Instead of going into crazy amounts of detail, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 has been the top consumer-level GPU for some time now. The RTX 3090 Ti takes that a step further than the RTX 3090 with:
- 10752 vs. 10496 CUDA cores
- 21Gbps vs. 19.5Gbps GDDR6X
- 1.86GHz vs. 1.7GHz boost clock
- Roughly 12% higher operations per second
- 450W vs. 350W TDP
- $1999 vs. $1499 Fantasy MSRP
We are using “Fantasy” MSRP because the street price for the GeForce RTX 3090 has not been $1499 for most of the product’s lifetime.
While we are getting 12% more performance for 33% more, the bigger spec change is that that 12% additional performance comes at a 100W higher TDP or around 29% higher TDP. So we get roughly 30% higher costs (initial purchase and power), but 12% more performance. While this probably is not the deal of the century, we have no doubt this card will sell well.
Final Words
Perhaps the bigger implication is the lack of competition. This is going to be a flagship part for months/ quarters not years since the RTX 3000 series came out in 2020. This is a late-cycle upgrade. Even with 10% inflation, and a 12% bump in performance, it is quite easy to see that NVIDIA is charging a lot more for its cards. The RTX 3080 Ti was another example going from $699 to $1199. While AMD, and soon Intel, will be discussing value parts, NVIDIA’s lack of competition at the higher end, even on a ~2-year-old architecture (launched in the data center first) is really shown by NVIDIA massively raising prices and still having demand. NVIDIA has built such a dominant position that it can pass along major hikes.
While some may lament at these prices not being good for gamers, the GeForce RTX 3090 and now RTX 3090 Ti are more of thinly veiled professional cards without the Titan or other monikers. These are designed for those who make money from GPU accelerated work where the cost of the hardware is a lot less than the value derived. Given this trend, our readers should also be a bit nervous of the next-generation data center GPU pricing and associated support options.
With the ATX 3.0 and AD102 / RTX 4090 coming our wallets have never hurt more, save for memory prices.
Gotta save up for next year.
I think another reason prices have gone up is related to the supply chain. Since there is a limit on how many total can be manufactured, the RTX 3090 Ti would sell out in a week if the price were too low. After that no stock would be available for the rest of the year.
No stock is even worse publicity than high prices.
How is this a GPGPU-focused card? It probably has 1/32 the FP64 performance, like GeForce, no ECC, like GeForce, and is focused to be installed in a workstation/normal PC case, and without a Quadro sync port so that all your monitors actually light up properly, like GeForce.
This is a GeForce card with 2x GeForce but 1/3 Quadro price.