The first rumors about Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 Ti graphics card (aka Titan Ada) emerged months before it launched the GeForce RTX 40-series. Later on, images of its oversized quad-slot cooler leaked into the wild. Eventually the company reportedly decided to cancel the product, which essentially morphed it into urban legend status. Prior to today, we've never seen the whole GeForce RTX 4090 Titanium package, which was meant to be the best graphics card ever — or at least the fastest. That dream may be dead, which is probably for the best, but the images live on.
(Image credit: VideoCardz/Reddit)
A Reddit post earlier today helped to fill in some missing bits and pieces, showing the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti (or Titan Ada — we're still not sure what it was going to be called) in all of its chunky glory. Just like the previously published images, the card featured a printed circuit board oriented perpendicularly to the motherboard slot, with a quad-slot cooling system and presumably still two fans.
Because of the design, display outputs for the card are located in a rather non-standard manner. The device was said to carry a paper label bearing the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti name on it. This somewhat implies that the card was not going to use Titan branding, but would instead bear a more conventional RTX 4090 Ti model number.
When compared to an Nvidia Titan RTX, based on the TU102 graphics processor, the GeForce RTX 4090 Ti indeed looks gigantic — just like the Titans of legend. While gamer4life, the Redditor who published the images of the alleged 4090 Ti, eventually removed them, fortunately VideoCardz was quick enough to save them. This may prove that the product was a real deal and Nvidia (or someone close to Nvidia who supplied the sample to the leaker) asked for the images to be removed.
The real reasons behind Nvidia's decision to cancel the product aren't known, but there's plenty of speculation. The company already has its RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card for professionals that uses AD102 with 18,176 CUDA cores, albeit running at relatively low clocks (up to 2505 MHz) and featuring a 300W TGP.
Nvidia could offer something similar for the consumer market, but with higher clocks and higher performance. That naturally would push power use up, possibly way up, and given the melting 16-pin fiasco, perhaps Nvidia decided to just stick to its GeForce RTX 4090 as its range-topping offering. Note that there are still rumors of a potential RTX 4090 Ti circulating, without the monster quad-slot cooler. We'll see if that potential card actually sees the light of day in the coming months.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
The last top-tier card that was worth the investment to buy the Ti version was the GTX 1080 Ti. All of the other Ti cards didn't justify their price/performance ratio. I'll stick with the 4090. Hella expensive, but leaps and bounds better than the 4080 or RX 7900.
I'll stick with the 4090. Hella expensive, but leaps and bounds better than the 4080 or RX 7900.
Yep. I bought it too and it's a beast of a card. The 4090 is the only 4000 series card worth buying, if you can swallow the price. It's a huge generational leap over the 3090, offering as much as 80% greater performance.
