Nvidia launches GeForce RTX 3090 Ti for $1999

Nvidia today finally launched the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, the company's flagship consumer graphics card that was first revealed back in January alongside the RTX 3050.

The RTX 3090 Ti has a fully enabled GA102 GPU with 10752 CUDA cores, which is only slightly higher than the 10496 on the RTX 3090. The RT cores have gone up from 82 to 84 and the Tensor cores from 328 to 336. The base/boost clocks have gone from 1.4GHz/1.7GHz to 1.67GHz/1.86GHz. It includes the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory but the speed has been increased from 19.5 Gbps to 21 Gbps.

Nvidia claims the RTX 3090 Ti has 40 TFLOPS of single precision performance compared to 35 TFLOPS of the RTX 3090. In gaming, it is 9 percent faster on average compared to the RTX 3090. However, with the higher performance also comes higher power consumption. The RTX 3090 Ti has a power draw of 450W, which is 100W more than the RTX 3090.

Nvidia seems to be primarily positioning the RTX 3090 Ti as a content creator's card, focusing on the 24GB of memory you get compared to the 10GB or 12GB of the RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti. However, even the standard RTX 3090 has 24GB of memory, so I'm not sure what's new here.

Similarly, the company is once again making claims of 8K gaming, which are about as realistic today as they were two years ago when the RTX 3090 was announced.

Finishing off this milquetoast announcement is the outrageous price, a cool $1999 for the Founders Edition model. That's a 33 percent increase over the RTX 3090 despite the company's own single digit performance improvement claims. And since this is MSRP, expect to pay a lot more in the current market.

I'm sure this will appeal to those who simply want the fastest graphics card on the market. After all, the RTX 3090 was the previous fastest card on the market and the RTX 3090 Ti is measurably faster. And there are customers for whom money is no object or who can make it back by the work they do on this hardware. Then there are also the scalpers and the crypto miners. So it's not as if there isn't a market for it. And GPU manufacturers know this, which is why they have stopped pretending that prices need to be sensible when you can get away with putting any number on the box.