Nvidia recently announced the upcoming release of its most powerful graphics card to date, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. The company briefly mentioned the card during its CES 2022 keynote.
While many are looking forward to the release of Nvidia’s new gaming powerhouse, a new leak suggests that the production of the card may have been put on hold for the time being.
TweakTown reported today that an anonymous source has reached out about Nvidia’s choice to halt the manufacturing of the RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. According to the source, Nvidia has asked its board partners to pause the production of custom RTX 3090 Ti cards. The source wasn’t able to verify the reason behind that decision, so all that remains is to speculate.
There can be several reasons why Nvidia would have to hit the brakes on the RTX 3090 Ti. TweakTown suggests that there may be problems with the silicon. It’s also not a stretch to assume that the ongoing GPU shortage may play a part, although this would likely simply delay production instead of stopping it entirely.
VideoCardz also cites its own sources and confirms that Nvidia has indeed chosen to halt production for the time being, citing issues with the hardware and the BIOS as the two main reasons behind that choice. There’s no telling whether Nvidia’s board partners will need to revise the graphics cards that have already been made.
Nvidia hasn’t actually confirmed a release date for the RTX 3090 Ti. While the budget RTX 3050 (also announced during CES 2022) received a confirmed January 27 launch date, its much more powerful sibling was only briefly mentioned during Nvidia’s keynote. Nevertheless, previous rumors pointed toward January 27 for both cards, although that seems to have fallen through — if it was ever the plan to begin with.
The one thing Nvidia has promised is that it would talk more about the card later this month. There is still a lot of information left to fill in: Aside from an official release date, we don’t know much about the card’s specifications. The ultra-high-end GPU will feature 24GB of 21GB/s GDDR6X memory, adding up to a 1TB/s bandwidth. It will also have 320 Tensor cores, 40 shader cores, and 78 ray tracing cores.
Rumors suggest that aside from the above, the new Nvidia GPU will have 10,752 CUDA cores and a TDP of 450 watts. However, custom versions of the GPU may be much more power-hungry, with rumored TDPs of over 1000W.
As Nvidia hasn’t made any official statements on the matter yet, there’s no telling when the new RTX 3090 Ti will finally hit stores. Fortunately, we are likely to hear more about Nvidia’s plans sometime this month.