The RTX 3090 Ti details Nvidia promised would land in January still haven’t arrived

Recap: Remember when Nvidia gave us a glimpse of the long-rumored RTX 3090 Ti during its CES keynote? The company said that it would provide further details on the monster GPU “later this month,” but you’ve probably noticed that we’re now in February and are still waiting for more info about the Ampere flagship.

Rumors of an RTX 3090 Ti stretched back to May 2021 when a listing in Zotac’s FireStorm software suggested the company was confident one would arrive at some point. Several reports followed that claimed the card would launch in January, something that looked likely when Nvidia confirmed its existence during CES.

Nvidia Senior VP Jeff Fisher revealed some details about the RTX 3090 Ti (or tie, as he still insists on calling it) at CES. The card has 24GB of GDDR6X memory running at 21Gb/s, beating the 19.5Gb/s on the RTX 3090. It also boasts 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, and 320 tensor teraflops of performance and is expected to come with a 450W TDP alongside a 16-pin power connector.

For comparison, the vanilla RTX 3090 offers 36 shader teraflops, 69 RT teraflops, and 285 tensor teraflops.

With more details promised in January, some were hoping we might even see the RTX 3090 Ti launch last month. Sadly, we got neither. So what’s going on? One of the main reasons behind the silence could be the reported problems found in the card’s hardware, likely to be the PCB, and the GPU’s BIOS, which would affect production given how late they’ve been discovered. And that’s not even taking the global chip shortage into account.

But even if the card does launch in February, it’s not going to be exempt from any of the problems plaguing the industry right now. It’s expected to have a $1,999 MSRP. Considering that most graphics cards are still around double their suggested retail price, you might be paying close to $4,000 for one—and that’s the Founders Edition; high-end third-party variants could go for even more. Nvidia, meanwhile, remains suspiciously quiet.

On the subject of the graphics card crisis, Intel recently responded to the situation by promising to ship “millions” of Arc Alchemist GPUs every year.

h/t: Tom’s Hardware