Nvidia unveils 'world's fastest' graphics card
Graphics card maker Nvidia is finally offering its most powerful consumer desktop graphics card to the public.
Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at CES 2022 in January, promising it would be "a monster GPU", better than last year's $1,499 RTX 3090. It would be its next "Big Ferocious GPU", it said.
Both of these are the peak of its range of consumer desktop graphics cards, aimed at gamers, folks who make 3D-gaming graphics, and data scientists.
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Of course, with the global chip shortage, buying last year's RTX 3090 and even the second tier RTX 3080 was difficult.
As for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, Nvidia planned to share more details about it in January, but only now, two months later, has it announced availability of what it boasts is "the world's fastest graphics card".
And for that, consumers can expect to pay upwards of $1,999, excluding taxes, from Nvidia and distributers like Asus.
Nvidia highlights the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti features 10,752 CUDA cores and 24GB of 21Gbps GDDR6X memory. It "boasts 78 RT-TFLOPs, 40 Shader-TFLOPs and 320 Tensor-TFLOPs of power," according to Nvidia.
While availability of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti may follow the same course this year as the RTX 3090 and 3080 did last year, prices of last year's RTX-30-series graphics card models are dropping massively — and it's not because the global chip crunch has ended.
The Biden administration's US Trade Representative Office last week announced it would reinstate waivers on Trump-era China tariffs for 352 items, which included electronics.
That shift in trade policy was behind Asus' announcement yesterday that it would reduce prices on RTX 30-series graphics cards by about 25%. Price drops apply to GeForce RTX 3050, RTX 3060, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090.
"As a result of the latest tariff lift on Chinese imports from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Gamers and PC enthusiasts will see lower prices on ASUS GeForce RTX™ 30-series graphic cards starting on April 1st, 2022," Asus said.
"ASUS is among the first to pass these savings on to its consumers. Lower prices will affect entry level GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, mid-range RTX 3070 and high performance RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards. Consumers should expect prices to decline up to 25% on different models throughout the springtime."