At CES in January, Nvidia announced two new desktop graphics cards. One of them, the lower-midrange RTX 3050, got a price and a release date, and the reviews have already come and gone. The other, the tippy top-end RTX 3090 Ti, had announced some of its specs, but the company said it would have more details “by the end of the month.”
But we are now mid-February and the company still has no news to report. An Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge that the company “currently has no more information to share” about the fast, but almost certainly expensive, flagship GPU.
This follows reports in mid-January that the company and its partners had halted production of the 3090 Ti due to alleged issues with the GPU’s BIOS and the hardware itself. Whether fixes can be applied to GPUs already manufactured is unclear, but if the GPU die itself needs to be overhauled in some way, limited production capacity amid the ongoing global chip shortage could cause significant delays.
This saga is only truly noteworthy because Nvidia seems to have missed its own deadline and not because it really makes a difference to most people — whether RTX 3090 Ti store listings exist or not, you wouldn’t just go to one. shop or hop on a site and buy one. GPU prices seem to be slowly going down at the time of writing, but it will probably be a while before it’s easy to just buy one at the listed retail price. I am not recommend that Nvidia paper will launch the 3090 Ti before the actual hardware is ready! I’m just saying that in 2022 it would be very difficult to tell the difference.