Back in January at CES, Nvidia announced two new desktop graphics cards. One of them, the lower-midrange RTX 3050, got a price and a release date, and reviews have already come and gone. The other, the top-end RTX 3090 Ti, had some specs announced, but the company said it would have more details “by the end of the month”.
But it’s already half of February, and the company still has no news to share. An Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge that the company “does not currently have further information”on the fast but almost certainly expensive flagship GPU.
This follows reports in mid-January that the company and its partners have stopped production of the 3090 Ti due to alleged issues with the GPU BIOS and the hardware itself. It’s not clear if fixes can be applied to already-produced GPUs, but if the GPU die itself needs to be revised in some way, limited manufacturing capacity amid the ongoing global chip shortage could result in significant delays.
This saga is only really noteworthy because Nvidia seems to have missed its deadline, not because it really matters to most people – whether RTX 3090 Ti retail listings exist or not, you can’t just go to a store or go to site and buy. At the time of this writing, GPU prices seem to be slowly coming down, but it will likely be some time before they can simply be bought at the listed retail price. I don’t recommend the Nvidia paper to run the 3090 Ti before the real hardware is ready! I’m just saying that in 2022 it would be awfully hard to tell the difference.