It looks like Nvidia’s working on an RTX 3090 Ti – A new RTX Flagship
It looks like Nvidia’s working on an RTX 3090 Ti – A new RTX Flagship
According to prior leaks from @kopite7kimi and @Greymon55, Nvidia’s new RTX flagship will feature a 400+ watt (likely 450W) power limit and 10752 CUDA cores. The increased performance of this graphics card will primarily come from its faster memory solution and its higher power target. It is also speculated that Nvidia will remove NVLink from their RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER, killing SLI for good. Â
A new power connector
Nvidia is also reportedly moving its RTX 3090 Ti to a new 16-pin power connector, which is said to be a new power connector standard for PCIe 5.0 This new connection will allegedly use 16 pins and deliver more power than today’s PCIe 6+2-pin power cables. This is necessary for today’s PC market, as modern graphics cards are starting to use ridiculous numbers of PCIe 6+2 pin power cables. We need a new power cable standard that can handle the power draw off modern high-end GPUs. While Nvidia’s 12-pin power standard failed to receive any true adoption from PSU manufacturers, today’s rumoured 16-pin PCIe standard seems more likely to be received favourably by the industry.Â
In 2020, following Nvidia’s RTX 30 series launch event, we discussed Nvidia’s plans for an RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER graphics card and Nvidia’s options for the then hypothetical graphics card. Back then, we predicted that Nvidia would create an RTX 3090 successor with 21Gbps GDDR6X memory modules and start using 2GB GDDR6X memory chips.Â
This move would push the memory bandwidth of Nvidia’s Ampere flagship by around 7.5%, pushing its memory bandwidth past the 1TBps speed barrier. Beyond that, the move to 2GB chips will allow Nvidia to use 12 GDDR6X memory chips instead of 24. This alteration gives Nvidia half as many DRAM chips to place, power, and cool. This change dramatically simplifies Nvidia’s RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER GPU design and manufacturing. Â
Videocardz has reported that this change will require Nvidia to change the board design of its RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER graphics card. Such changes will be required regardless to accommodate the GPU’s new PCIe power connector. Even so, modifications could be needed to handle the bandwidth of 21Gbps memory chips more reliably or to accommodate for the fact that DRAM chips will not need to be mounted as both sides of the RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER’s PCB.Â
More GPUs for January 2022?Â
Intel’s launching their ARC series of dedicated gaming graphics cards in early 2022, giving them an opportunity to attack Nvidia’s dominant mindshare when the GPU market and add some much-needed competition to the GPU market.Â
Nvidia has a tried and true method of shutting down its competitors when new GPU releases arrive. We have seen this frequently to counter AMD’s new releases. We saw the GTX 1070 Ti launched to counter AMD’s RX Vega 56 and their RTX Super series to counter the Radeon RX 5000 series. Now that Intel is ready to compete, why wouldn’t Nvidia use this tactic again to reassert its dominance?Â
Nvidia is reportedly working on an RTX 3090 Ti, an RTX 3070 Ti 16GB and a new RTX 2060 12GB model to counter Intel’s incoming GPU lineup. With these launches, Nvidia wants to show the world that they are still the best. They will not let Intel attack their mindshare.Â
Intel’s Arc series flagship is rumoured to feature a 16GB frame buffer, just like AMD’s high-end RX 6000 series products. Nvidia’s rumoured RTX 3070 Ti 16GB could be seen as an admission that 8GB of VRAM is no longer enough for modern high-end gaming applications. This can already be seen in Far Cry 6.Â
You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s rumoured RTX 3090 Ti/SUPER graphics card on the OC3D Forums.Â