- GPU prices are falling, is what I would say
if not for the RTX 3090 Ti, Nvidia's latest and,
ho-ho, greatest.
Look at this thing.
It is massive.
Just look at the cooler.
It's like three slots, maybe three and a half,
and I think there's like eight separate heat pipes here.
It's bound to be the most powerful consumer card ever.
But this time, we don't wanna be a part of the hype machine
that sells these things.
Let me explain what I mean.
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(upbeat music)
- We'll be comparing the new Ti
to the only GPU we really need to,
the RTX 3090, which is quite close in specification
to the new big boy here.
So close, in fact, that I had to triple-check my notes.
Yes, both have 24 gigs of GDDR6X memory,
but the Ti pulls ahead in memory bandwidth,
to almost, but not quite, a terabyte per second.
It also boasts an extra 2.4% more GPU cores
that are thankfully clocked 10 to 12 percent higher,
and draws a staggering 29% higher total graphics power
at 450 watts.
To achieve that, Nvidia has resorted
to a triple 8-pin-to-12-pin dongle
with a hefty 850-watt power supply requirement.
They recommend a kilowatt.
Just hoping our GPU test bench can handle that kinda load.
In "F1 2021", we're looking at a roughly eight
or nine percent improvement over the RTX 3090,
with ray tracing disabled, of course,
which translates into about ten fps.
When we enable ray tracing, the extra cores work
their magic for a good 13% improvement,
keeping things much closer to 60 fps,
maxed out at 4K.
"Far Cry 6" sees a slightly less impressive result
at around five or six percent with ray tracing disabled
and just a little bit more with ray tracing turned on.
Like the RTX 3090, Nvidia says
that 8K gaming is one of the 3090 Ti's strong suits,
but when I tried it out, "F1 2021" chugged
at around 30 fps, so I didn't bother testing any further.
Maybe productivity will show us a better example
of how the power of the 3090 Ti will improve your life.
Blender, hmm, doesn't seem to think so.
We're looking at a few seconds, at most,
depending on what renderer you're using.
V-Ray gives the 3090 Ti a slight lead, too,
although the RTX result is over 100 points more,
so hooray, a whole four percent lead.
Octane renderer gave us a similar kind of situation
to these, as well.
It's, whatever.
Moving on to power, we ran five laps
of "F1 2021" as a typical gaming load
and we saw a power draw spike as high as 480 watts.
Wait, that cannot be right.
480 watts?
Really?
Holy (beeps)!
Yeah, and the average was over 400,
not much lower than the peak wattage the RTX 3090 drew
in the same test.
To be fair to Nvidia, while that's an absurd amount
of power, more than an entire PC
with a low-end GPU might draw,
it's roughly inline with the performance improvement
we saw in that game.
So you're getting frames proportionally
in exchange for the extra juice.
If the rumors are to be believed,
we'll see even more power draw
in search of higher frame rates
when the next generation rolls out.
Speaking of which, why is this GPU only launching now,
when the 40-Series Ada Lovelace GPUs are supposedly right
around the corner?
Well, I've got a few theories.
Maybe this is an indication that Ada isn't right
around the corner and Nvidia's trying
to make-do with what they've got.
Or maybe the 3090 Ti was delayed for so long
during the silicon shortage that
it's launching way later than they planned.
Or maybe they just had high-binned GPUs kicking
around that they wanted to clear out
before Ada hit later this year.
Our screwdriver and backpack are hitting
later this year, too.
Sign up at lttstore.com to be the first
to know when they're ready.
The GPU clear-out angle is a very likely one, IMO.
Nvidia's existing A40, a data center GPU,
shares most of its spec sheet
with the 3090 Ti, albeit
with a significantly lower board power
and more, but slower, memory.
Sure enough, the Nvidia Control Panel
even has an ECC memory support toggle
like you might find on one of those cards.
While I don't have a problem with this, in principle,
I do have a problem with the price they're asking for it,
and I'm not comfortable with how much power
this thing is capable of drawing.
Starting at $2,000 US, MSRP,
the EVGA one we tested costs 2,200.
You're looking at a 25% premium, or more,
over a GPU that is already priced
like a Titan and already is not proportionally faster
than the next card down the stack for the money.
Nvidia wants us to compare against the Titan RTX,
a card that already wasn't worth the price
when it launched, and which didn't even live
up to the Titan name, with its crippled FP64 performance.
That card, like this one, has more in common
with the Titan Xp, a card that
also had crippled FP64 performance
and launched at $1,200 US,
$300 less than the RTX 3090.
That is the RTX tax in a nutshell,
and calling this a $500 price drop
from the Titan RTX is a slap in the face
to anyone who thought that the 3090 itself was
already making that comparison.
It's one thing to have a halo product
for the die-hards, but when even
that product gets eclipsed, in terms of pricing,
that's when we journey into the absurd.
If many people thought that Nvidia had jumped the shark
with the RTX 3090's $1,500 price tag,
then they're now trying to see
just how big a shark they can clear
with the 3090 Ti.
Especially with competition
from AMD and Intel on the horizon
and with the RTX 3090 coming back down to earth in price,
it feels like a cynical cash grab,
no matter what their intention was.
You'd be forgiven for losing track
of just what GPUs even cost anymore
with how crazy pricing has been
over the past couple of years.
After all, as recently as this month,
RTX 3090s were going for over three grand,
sometimes over four,
easily double the original asking price.
Now that's finally changing.
The RTX 3090 is routinely going for 2K or less.
Someone even got really lucky on this one.
And so Nvidia read the room full of wary gamers
and professionals trying to catch a break,
and with a straight face, bragged
to their investors that people were paying
more for new GPUs while slapping
an astronomical price tag onto this thing.
As for power, yeah, I get that
just releasing an A40 with 24 gigs of VRAM
for the consumer market wouldn't be very impressive
next to the 3090, but this is just ridiculous.
The EVGA card even has a thankfully unpopulated second
ATX 3.0 power connector, which would theoretically give
this thing access to over 1,200 watts of power.
It's a chilling look at a world where watts don't matter,
as long as you're getting frames.
You'll note, however, that we didn't do
very many benchmarks to find reasons
for this thing to exist.
That's because we didn't get our card
until two business days before embargo-lift,
and even if we got it sooner,
the driver was only made available two days before that.
The final version
of the reviewer's guide was uploaded yesterday.
Nvidia clearly did not want us to look
too closely at the RTX 3090 Ti, and that's okay,
because I'm not sure how much more I need to see.
The worst part about all of this is
that there's nothing that I can say or do
that will prevent people from buying it.
The RTX 3090, itself, is already nearly half a percent
of the Steam Hardware Survey.
That is twice as many GPUs than the RX 6700 XT
and nearly so for the RTX 3050 Ti.
If you expand it out, the desktop GA102 GPU
that powers everything from the RTX 3080
to the 3090 Ti represents a combined total
of nearly 2%, a big enough portion
to put it in the top ten.
People want the big boy, and I think we deserve
some of the blame for that,
kinda like how we deserve blame
for our storage going haywire.
Get subscribed so you don't miss
our data recovery adventure, by the way.
But if you want this thing,
if you're one of the people
that Nvidia says want the absolute best,
then I don't know what to tell you.
Perhaps money is no object
and you wanna get as close to the 8K gaming promise
as you can.
Or maybe that extra little bit of blood Nvidia squeezed
from the stone is exactly what you need
for peak productivity.
I disagree.
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- Thanks for watching, guys.
Sorry this one was a bit ranty.
I just, I know it's not for everybody,
but I don't like what this represents.
Maybe go grab a palate cleanser
with our recent video
on the GRAID GPU-accelerated NVME solution.
That one's actually really cool.