Given all the recent leaks about Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (see also 3070 Ti 16GB Delayed and the 21Gbps rumor), it looks pretty clear that Nvidia will soon launch a new king of the GPU benchmarks, supplanting the 3090 as the fastest option in the best graphics cards. Two things remain unclear: exact specifications and the launch date. Regarding the latter, leaked documents point to January 27, 2022, as the availability date.
Nvidia is rumored to formally introduce its GeForce RTX 3090 Ti on January 4, 2022, at CES 2022. But the company will only lift embargo from product reviews and let its partners start selling the new boards on January 27, 2022, according to excerpts from documents from two companies: MSI (which covers availability of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X 24G) and presumably Nvidia itself. While the information comes from one source (VideoCardz), one excerpt corroborates another, so it's a reasonably safe bet at this point that Nvidia indeed wants its GeForce RTX 3090 on shelves for a January 27 launch.
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will be the company's new flagship offering, delivering even more performance than the GeForce RTX 3090. The new card will supposedly use a fully enabled GA102 GPU with 10,752 CUDA cores (up from 10,496 on the RTX 3090) mated with 24GB of Micron's GDDR6X memory connected using a 384-bit interface. The memory will get a boost to a 21 GT/s data transfer rate (up from 19.5 GT/s in case of the RTX 3090). Also noteworthy is that the board will reportedly use Micron's 16Gb memory chips (instead of 8Gb ICs), which will optimize its cost and put all of the VRAM on one side of the PCB.
The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti won't get a significant performance uplift from its additional 256 CUDA cores unless it also gets higher clocks — it only has 2.4% more cores. However, the faster memory will boost bandwidth from 936.2 GBps up to 1,018 GBps, a 9% increase, which will positively affect performance in bandwidth-hungry games and in high resolutions.
It's also unclear what will happen to the original GeForce RTX 3090 once the RTX 3090 Ti is launched. With the release of other Ti variants in the Ampere lineup (RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 Ti), vanilla versions remained afloat. But since we are dealing with a flagship here, Nvidia may choose to retire the RTX 3090 in a bid not to offer a competitor for the RTX 3090 Ti. We're also curious to see if Nvidia will implement its LHR anti-mining lock on the 3090 Ti, something it has so far avoided for the 3090 models. Maybe it will even get some tweaks to further combat the LHR workarounds from mining software.
Nvidia does not comment on unreleased products and rumors, so it's impossible to confirm or deny any information about the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Still, we suspect we'll find out more come CES 2022 — which Nvidia won't be attending in person, so plan on another video from Jensen's kitchen.
