Update: PC gamers, now is not the time to buy a new graphics card.
Nvidia first announced the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at CES 2022, with the promise of more details at the end of January. That deadline came and went without any additional information, and the speculation is that Nvidia is struggling to produce the card in meaningful quantities, prompting indefinite delays.
While we wait for confirmation from Nvidia about what’s actually going on, retailers are filling the vacuum with their own listings for the upcoming card — and the prices aren’t encouraging, even in a world that’s used to GPU inflation.
The latest listings come from an Estonian retailer’s listings tweeted by @momomo_us. With a currency conversion, all three cards come in at around $4,000 with the tax removed.
The cheapest of the lot is the Asus TUF RTX 3090 Ti at €4,332.11 (or around $3,968). That seems pricey until you get onto the other two — a €4,413.85 (around $4,043) overclocked version and €4,577.40 (around $4,193) liquid-cooled ROG Strix model.
As our sister site Tom’s Hardware points out, this is highly unlikely to be the actual MSRP for the RTX 3090 TI. The vanilla RTX 3090s currently sells for around $2,600 on Ebay when the price should be $1,499 new. Assuming a similar level of gouging here, that would suggest the actual price to be around the $2,300 mark. Probably closer to $2,000, as you’d imagine there’s an additional premium here for the new and shiny.
That’s still hugely expensive, obviously, but the GPU will reportedly go some way to justifying it with truly enviable specs. We’ve heard talk of a fully enabled GA102 core with 24GB of upgraded GDDR6X memory offering a total of 10,752 CUDA cores. All of this power will apparently come at an energy cost, though, with the card reportedly having a total power draw of 450W.
But when the new graphics card will emerge is anyone’s guess. With Nvidia missing its own deadline to reveal more at the end of last month, we’re now in a state of limbo as to when it’ll actually appear, making these possible prices something of a moot point.
While the specs listed above will make the RTX 3090 Ti an enviable GPU for many years to come, it’s worth remembering that Nvidia is rumored to be unveiling the RTX 40 series before the year is out — and with price gouging and shortages being what they are, many will be tempted just to sit this generation out and see if things look better in 12 months time.
