Apparently, the RTX 3090 Ti was never planned for the mass market.
The Geforce RTX 3090 Ti is said to be Nvidia’s new flagship and the most powerful graphics card on the market overall. According to Nvidia, detailed information about the card was planned for January 2022. Until today, i.e. already in February, it is quiet about the RTX 3090 Ti. There is no new official information and a release of the card or even a release date is not in sight.
The YouTuber Moores Law is Dead now names possible founders, which is why, according to his sources, the card was never planned as a normal release for the mass market. Accordingly, from the beginning there was only a so-called Paperlaunch
in conversation. In other words, a launch that only takes place on paper or in very small numbers.
But not only Nvidia has unusual graphics card launches. The release of the RX 6500 XT from AMD was anything but normal, as we report in this article:
more on the subject
Unusual and alarming: no test of the RX 6500 XT
Not enough chips and BIOS problems
The expected very low numbers of the RTX 3090 Ti should also be related to the fact that the yield of suitable chips is too low. The new flagship uses the fully-fledged GA102 chip, so if certain parts of a chip aren’t usable in manufacturing, it’s no longer a viable option for a 3090 Ti. In addition, the chip must also achieve the desired clock rates.
It is quite normal that not every chip achieves the same good results after manufacture. The less good variants are then simply used for slightly slower models. In the case of the RTX 3090 Ti, however, there is little leeway here.
Problems with the card’s BIOS should make matters worse. The sources of Moore’s Law is Dead calculate with correspondingly few models:
- Those 1: “To date, nobody is talking about the 3090 Ti. There are no talks about release planning. This is a world record map and it probably won’t even appear in some regions.”
- Those 2: “Whenever it appears, this card is like a Porsche 918. You won’t find it at every dealer. This is a show card that most dealers just can’t get their hands on.
- Those 3: “I (OEM) don’t have any updates, Nvidia doesn’t communicate. Delays happen but this one is abnormal because it’s so quiet and nothing happens after the announcement.”
In summary, according to the sources, a commercial launch in large numbers was never planned. Therefore, the YouTuber was not surprised that there was no official launch of Nvidia and no further information. According to another source, the launch of the map has been postponed indefinitely.
Not high-end, but available: RX 6500XT
What can you expect when the map finally appears?
It is therefore uncertain when the card will actually appear. But when the time comes, don’t expect to actually be able to buy them. The number of items will probably be very limited and many retailers will not even have the RTX 3090 Ti on the shelves.
The performance will unsurprisingly be a bit above the RTX 3090, but the surcharge of this model compared to the RTX 3080 is not really justified in view of the small performance advantage (even if something similar is probably true for all high-end products at the upper end of the range price scale applies).
So if Moore’s Law’s sources are to be believed, the high-end GPU is more about bragging rights and world records than a true consumer graphics card. This is also suggested by the prices that were seen as placeholders at various retailers. We reported in this article:
RTX 3090 Ti prices
And we thought the Titan graphics cards were expensive
Here we have seen prices of around 3,200 to 4,000 dollars for an RTX 3090 Ti. However, the offers have never gone online to this day. At the same time, the power consumption and specifications of the high-end graphics card are enormous.
What do you think of absolute high-end models like the RTX 3090 Ti? Do they have a right to exist for well-heeled gamers and the hunt for world records, or could graphics cards of this type be dispensed with entirely? Feel free to write it in the comments!
