Nvidia’s reference design for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is built with a cooler that at a glance is identical to the one found on the company’s reference RTX 3080 Ti. The card is equipped with a larger cooler that has two fans. These fans are positioned on opposite sides of the card, with one on the front of the card and the other on the back. Neither fan is able to push air straight through the card and out the other side; instead, they work to push air through the cooler and out the back of the PC case.
The card is well-endowed with a total of 10,752 CUDA cores, but this is only a slight increase over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 that launched in 2020 with 10,496 cores. The change in core count alone isn’t really significant enough to give the RTX 3090 Ti much of an edge over its older sibling, so Nvidia also pushed up the clock speed on the RTX 3090 Ti to give it more of an edge.
The standard RTX 3090 Ti graphics card will have a base clock of 1,670MHz, which is roughly a 19% increase over the RTX 3090’s base clock of 1,400MHz. The more important boost clock was also increased, to a lesser extent, from 1,700MHz on the GeForce RTX 3090 to 1,860MHz on the RTX 3090 Ti.
Nvidia upgraded the memory subsystem on the RTX 3090 Ti a touch, as well. Both the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti come equipped with 24GB of GDDR6X RAM that connects to the GPU core over a 384-bit interface. But the RTX 3090 Ti makes use of RAM clocked at a slightly higher speed that enables more bandwidth over the same interface.
Overall, there’s little doubt that the RTX 3090 Ti is now Nvidia’s fastest graphics card, but what’s less clear is if that card is a good buy. With an MSRP of $1,999.99, the card costs a full $500 more than the base-model RTX 3090 that has an MSRP of just $1,499.99. We haven’t tested one of these cards yet, but it seems doubtful the 2% increase in core count and the 9% increase in boost frequency will provide a sufficient performance boost to justify a 25% increase in price except in specific professional content creation scenarios.
The RTX 3090 Ti also has a higher (450-watt) TDP compared to the RTX 3090’s 350-watt TDP, which means it will draw more power and generate more heat. Nonetheless, if you really want to have the fastest single graphics card that Nvidia can offer, below are your key third-party options.
