After weeks of rumors and speculations surrounding its release, Nvidia‘s RTX 3090 Ti graphics card has finally gone on sale, but how does it compare to the vanilla RTX 3090 with regard to performance and value? Nvidia initially announced the RTX 3090 Ti at CES 2022 in January, and it represents the very best that the company has to offer in terms of gaming GPUs.
As for the RTX 3090, it was launched in September 2020 and is still not widely available for purchase over a year after its release. The availability problem extends to other graphics cards as well, which also remain out of stock at most retailers due to the crippling chip shortage. The supply crunch has been an ongoing problem for a few years now, and the situation is so bad that even scalpers have struggled to secure any GPUs.
Both the RTX 3090 and the 3090 Ti are based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture and built using an 8nm manufacturing process. They both feature 24GB of GDDR6X memory, although the new card comes with 40 Shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, and 320 Tensor teraflops, making it more powerful than the standard RTX 3090 on paper. It also comes with 10,752 CUDA cores, which is 256 more than the 10,496 on the vanilla 3090. The 3090 Ti also ships with a memory clock of 21 Gbps and a memory bandwidth of 1,008 GB/s, while the standard RTX 3090 has a memory speed of 19.5 Gbps and a bandwidth of 936 GB/s.
The RTX 3090 Ti Is Power Hungry
What’s really notable, however, is the jump in power requirement for the new card. The 3090 Ti comes with a 450W TDP, which is a full 100W higher than the RTX 3090’s 350W power draw. That makes the 3090 Ti a power-hungry beast, and using it for long hours will reflect on the monthly power bill. That said, the 3090 Ti will be faster than the vanilla 3090, with the popular Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel claiming that it would offer a 5 percent performance improvement in most cases. While it’s not an earth-shattering improvement, it’s still faster and Nvidia is charging a handsome premium for the enhanced performance.
The RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition has an asking price of $1,999, making it a niche product meant for serious gamers and extreme enthusiasts with heavy pockets. The standard RTX 3090, meanwhile, has an asking price of $1,499, which is still not meant for mainstream gamers and DIY enthusiasts. Still, the $500 price difference is hard to ignore, especially when the increase in gaming performance is relatively modest. That makes the RTX 3090 Ti a super-niche card in an already rarefied segment of the gaming GPU market, while the standard Nvidia RTX 3090 is the better choice for most people in terms of value and practicality.
Source: Nvidia, Linus Tech Tips/YouTube
