It has been claimed that the Nvidia RTX 4090 Ti is canceled, with the company not set to add an even higher-power gaming GPU to its range before the arrival of its Ada Next architecture and RTX 5000 series graphics cards.
The claim comes from established leaker, Kopite7kimi, who has been accurate on several previous leaks. According to their latest tweet, there won’t be an RTX 4090 Ti ‘anymore’, suggesting Nvidia did indeed have plans for such a card but has now abandoned them.
If this does prove to be the case, it wouldn’t be overly surprising given that the Ada architecture AD102 GPUs that the RTX 4090 uses are also used in professional data center cards such as the Nvidia L40. With the company able to demand higher prices for such cards than even the $1,700 price of an RTX 4090, there’s little incentive to use full-spec AD102 GPUs for consumer-grade cards.
The RTX 4090 uses a cut-down version of the AD102, with only 16,384 of the GPU’s 18,432 stream processors enabled, so there is plenty of scope for Nvidia to create a higher-end RTX 4090 Ti-type card from the GPU, but again it makes little economic sense to do so. The main counterpoint to this argument is that a new RTX 5000 range is not expected to arrive until late 2024, which would leave a very large gap between release of flagship gaming GPUs, if the RTX 4090 Ti doesn’t arrive.
What’s more, we’ve previously seen rumors of an RTX 4000 Super range of cards that would see the full range of RTX 4090, 4080, 4070 and 4060 cards all get an upgrade. So it’s possible there won’t be an RTX 4090 Ti because there will be an RTX 4090 Super.
Meanwhile, in more positive news, Kopite7kimi also reports that there will be new variants of the RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 lineup that use the AD103 and AD106 GPUs. Currently, the RTX 4070 uses the smaller AD104 GPU while the RTX 4060 Ti uses the even smaller AD106 chip. As such, we could see a higher-end RTX 4070 Ti variant that uses the AD103 GPU, with a higher core count and larger memory configuration than the current RTX 4070.
Meanwhile, the new RTX 4060 variant could be an even higher-spec version of the RTX 4060 Ti that uses even more of the AD106 GPU than it currently does. Or, we could see a new RTX 4060 that uses an even more cut-down version of the AD106 instead of the AD107 that it currently uses.
Given the great deal of focus recently on VRAM allocation in its lower-end graphics cards, and the overall pricing of these cards, there’s clearly an opportunity here for Nvidia to rework its lineup to better fit the needs of gamers at the low to mid-range end of the market.
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