We had already expected Nvidia to reveal at least one new GPU, thanks to their CES 2021 invitation. However, as of January 4, 2022, instead of one GPU, that company showed off two; the RTX 3050 and the RTX 3090 Ti.
Both of the revealed cards were already rumored to exist, but I had taken the news with a grain of salt. Yet, here we are. So, let’s talk about the RTX 3050 GPU first. which was the more reasonable card that was announced. What’s interesting here is that we’ve already seen a discrete RTX 3060 and the laptop RTX 3050 Ti. The RTX 3050, which will be released this month and should have similar performance to Ti variant.
Spec-wise, we’re looking at 9 Shader TFLOPS, 18 RT TFLOPS, 73 Tensor TFLOPS, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and will be available starting January 27, 2022, priced at $249. Even better is that at that price point, the card will bring the Ampere architecture, DLSS, and Ray Tracing. If the card doesn’t end up being a paper release, this could be just what the PC gaming scene needs.
Then we have the RTX 3090 Ti, a video card that I think is complete overkill, as Nvidia already has the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3090. Instead of waiting for the new series of RTX 4000 cards, they’ve revealed the Ti variant of a GPU that already wipes the floor with everything. I suppose if you have the money for the best of the best, then this is for you. A few things to take away from the RTX 3090 Ti is 24GB of GDDRX VRAM, which is the same as the original card. Though, Nvidia did some tweaking and will now push 21Gbps, instead of 19.5Gbps. It will have 40 shader TFLOPS, five more than the RTX 3090, and 10,752 CUDA cores.
Outside of that, we don’t know much about the card, and Nvidia wasn’t ready to dish out any performance numbers or pricing. It was pretty much “Yes, the card exists, and here it is.” But if we were to speculate about the pricing, the RTX 3090’s MSRP starts at $1499.99 and above. We could see the RTX 3090 Ti coming in close to $2000. We’ll know more officially as Nvidia will talk about the availability and pricing later this month.
You can watch it below if you haven’t seen the Nvidia CES 2022 keynote. It’s worth a watch as it touches on Nvidia’s GeForce Now, shows off some upcoming games and even the automotive strides thanks to Nvidia’s tech.