NVIDIA's RTX 3090 Ti is official at CES 2022 in Las Vegas, as a surprise: it's the most powerful Ampere-architected video card in the entire RTX 30 lineup, and it's likely to stay that way, being superseded by the next generation. Of course, it is also the most powerful video card ever produced in history.

Aesthetically, the Founders Edition is almost indistinguishable from the regular RTX 3090, save for the "Ti" lettering. The design is triple slot, and the heatsink is supposedly dual fans - one on each side. The card includes 24GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory - the amount is identical to the 3090 but the memory clock is increased by 7.7%. NVIDIA says that processing performance will also improve: 40 TFLOPs versus 35.6, or about 11% more. RT-TFLOPs (for ray tracing) are 78, and Tensor-TFLOPs (also critical for technologies like DLSS) are 320. The 3090 had 69.5 and 285 TFLOPs respectively.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA didn't go into much detail on the technical specifications. We don't know what the clock of the 8nm GA102 chip will be or how much extra power the card will consume. The rumours were quite alarming - they were talking about a TDP of 450W, which implies a suggested power supply of 1,000W. That's a big jump from the 750W required by the standard RTX 3090.

Interestingly, the RTX 3090's 8nm GA102 chip only uses 82 of the 84 SMs on board, and it's safe to assume that all of them are active on this 3090 Ti. The higher memory clock (19.5Gbps on the 3090) helps the card deliver performance that, on paper, is around 11-12% higher. It's also fair to assume that GPU frequencies will be slightly higher. There is also the question of the price, which could be very high. For reference, the 3090 debuted at $1,500, and with the chip crisis still raging, it's not impossible to imagine that this new card will cost $2,000.

Either way, we'll know more later this month. NVIDIA has promised to unveil all the key details, including pricing and availability, later in January. You can expect that there will be a dedicated mini-event, and that NVIDIA won't dismiss it with a press release. We'll see.

Written by: Joshua Wilson