Nvidia finally drops its wildly expensive RTX 3090 Ti GPU

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is finally here, but don’t expect to get your hands on it. As expected, it’s already sold out at some retailers.

Nvidia says the the RTX 3090 Ti wasn’t designed just for gaming, since it can also be used for content creators and data scientists. Everyone’s initial reaction may be to crank the settings to ultra high for gaming, but the GPU maker says the RTX 3090 Ti can be applied to data science and AI uses, or to creative projects that have highly-detailed models and textures.

Truthfully, if you’re going to use this latest graphics card just for gaming, you’re probably off better going for something much more affordable. At least from what I can tell, the only real reason to pick this up is if it helps you work more efficiently, otherwise it’ll just feel like you’re flexing the best graphics card to run Minecraft.

Side-by-side comparison — Nvidia is calling the RTX 3090 Ti the “world’s fastest graphics card” since it’s 60 percent faster than its RTX 2080 Ti and 55 percent faster than its Titan RTX. The RTX 3090 Ti has a whopping 10,752 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. All of this translates to a seven perfect faster performance according to some benchmark tests that VideoCardz already ran on 3DMark.

With a rather marginal boost in performance, the RTX 3090 Ti is a lot hungrier for power, with a 450W rating, up from the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 Ti’s 350W rating. So, even if you do manage to get a hold of the new graphics card, you might actually have to update your power supply to safely run it.

Sold out already — Nvidia says the RTX 3090 Ti is available from providers like ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galax, Gigabyte, INNO3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac. There’ll hopefully be enough of them to go around, but the latest GPU will still cost $1,999. Even though Nvidia just released it, the RTX 3090 Ti looks like it’s already sold out at Best Buy.

You could always wait for the RTX 40 Series graphics cards that Nvidia is rumored to be releasing later this year. While all we have are rumors and leaks, the next-gen flagship GPUs could offer a notable jump in specs, instead of the incremental one we see with the RTX 3090 Ti.