At its CES 2022 press conference, Nvidia has announced two new graphics cards – its flagship RTX 3090 Ti and new low-end RTX 3050. The new RTX 3090 Ti is a slightly better performing version of its current flagship 3090 (the Ti moniker has been used for years to denote an optimised version of an existing platform).
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The Nvidia RTX 30-series has been a massive success for the company, and has moved the performance needle of GPU’s significantly. Currently, the RTX 3090 is the most powerful GPU, with the RTX 3080 Ti close behind and the RTX 3080 as the mainstream flagship. All three these GPU’s are built atop the same GA102 chip, with the difference between them coming down to the number of active cores, clock speeds and memory configurations.
So how will the RTX 3090 Ti be better than RTX 3090? Well, it will have the same amount of GDDR6X memory at 24GB, but it will run at 21Gb/s where the previous flagship runs at 19.5Gb/s. The new GPU is capable of calculating 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops and 320 tensor (AI) teraflops, according to the company. That compares to the 3090’s 35.6 shader teraflops, 69.5 RT teraflops and 285 tensor teraflops.
NVIDIA says “more details will be coming later this month,” so we’d expect a small event focused on the 3090 Ti to be announced soon. Here we will presumably be told what the eye-watering price of the 3090 Ti will be. Remember, the 3090 costs $1,500 – or at least, that’s the MSRP when available and not resold by scalpers. The chip shortage means these cards are still difficult to get a hold of.
Nvidia also announced the RTX 3050 at the CES event, and will be the cheapest 30-series GPU in the range. The company didn’t give a lot of information regarding specs, but it has 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and will be able to calculate 9 shader teraflops, 18 RT teraflops and 73 tensor teraflops. The company says it’ll be able to power “the latest ray-traced games at over 60 frames per second.” It will cost $249 when it hits the market this quarter.
