Nvidia’s RTX 4090 Ti, the purportedly incoming refresh of the current Lovelace flagship, has been the subject of a fresh leak – and this supercharged RTX 4090 could be coming alongside a new RTX Titan.
The latest on the RTX 4090 Ti graphics card comes from well-known leaker Kopite7kimi on Twitter, as flagged up by VideoCardz.
RTX 4090 TiPG136/139-SKU31018176FP3296M L224Gbps 24G GDDR6Xtotal board power ~600WJanuary 30, 2023
The leaker believes the current plan is for the revamped flagship GPU to run with 18,176 CUDA Cores, along with 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM (running at 24Gbps), and a total board power usage of around 600W. The 4090 Ti is also set to use the same board as the RTX 4090, which would be no great surprise.
This combines with another rumor from the weekend in which a second leaker on Twitter, MEGAsizeGPU, posted what is supposedly an image of the RTX Titan, which if correct will be a huge four-slot GPU that pushes power usage up to 800W (using the same AD102 GPU, but doubling up the video memory of the RTX 4090 to 48GB, no less).
Analysis: A robust upgrade from the RTX 4090, perhaps – but at what cost?
Note that the mentioned 800W for the rumored RTX Titan is the maximum board power, not the rated TGP. Remember, the RTX 4090 has a TGP of 450W, but can be pushed further than this – up to 600W is the max power limit, at least with the Founders Edition (from Nvidia itself) and some third-party cards. So the RTX 4090 Ti will remain the same in this respect.
If there are RTX 4090 Ti and RTX Titan models coming, then maybe the Titan will differentiate itself with the full-fat core count for the AD102 chip, which is 18,432, slightly more than the rumored 18,176 CUDA Cores for the 4090 Ti here; and that would make sense. Although past rumors (from some time back, admittedly) have pegged the theoretical Titan with 18,176 cores (and we’ve heard nothing since to indicate this isn’t the case).
In the past, though, there seems to have been quite a bit of confusion about where Nvidia might go with a Lovelace model that sits on top of the RTX 4090. Some time ago, we heard rumors about a 4090 Ti, and then that it was perhaps canceled, and then that it might actually be an RTX Titan.
Rather than trying to pick which route to go with a range-topping AD102-powered graphics card, though, it seems Nvidia may actually now be preparing to push out both an RTX 4090 Ti and an RTX Titan. Of course, multiple pinches of salt are required with that idea…
We don’t get any clues in terms of what release timeframe Nvidia might be looking at, but that could well be wrapped up in how threatened Team Green feels by AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards. And right now, Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is not threatened by the RX 7900 XTX which is leading the charge for RDNA 3 (and compares more to the RTX 4080, broadly, rather than the 4090).
How much faster will the RTX 4090 Ti be than the current Lovelace flagship GPU? Well, the CUDA Core increase is 1,792, which isn’t massive. However, we should remember that on top of this, its theoretically faster VRAM (24Gbps according to the leaker, versus 21Gbps for the 4090) could further pep performance – and clock speeds might (and likely will) be upped slightly with the Ti variant.
So, can we hope for maybe a 15% performance increase with the 4090 Ti, or something in that order? Perhaps, though that’s likely a best-case scenario, and besides, the likely catch is that pricing will witness a bigger leap. The widely anticipated cost of the 4090 Ti is $2,000 (around £1,600, AU$2,800), or in other words, 25% dearer than the RTX 4090, compared to a 15% performance uptick.
In short, we’re expecting the overall value proposition of the 4090 Ti to be somewhat inferior to the 4090, and really, that’d hardly be a surprise given Nvidia’s form with premium graphics cards right now.
