NVIDIA May Not Release A Titan GPU With Ada Lovelace But A Faster Card Could Still Emerge
by
Zak Killian
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Tuesday, October 18, 2022, 05:18 PM EDT
The GeForce RTX 4090 is fast. Real fast. Fast enough that, even without DLSS upscaling—to say nothing of frame generation—you can play everything in 4K with the settings turned up to the ceiling. Despite that, it's not as fast as Ada could be, and there have been persistent rumors of a faster card waiting in the wings to swoop down on any competitor who dares to challenge NVIDIA's dominance. That card probably exists, but it's not going to be a Titan.
At least, according to kopite7kimi, who usually knows what he's talking about. Usually leaker tweets are a little cryptic, but his message on this topic was quite clear: "We won't see Titan of Ada Lovelace."
The Titan nomenclature dates back to the days of the GeForce GTX 700 series, where the original GeForce GTX TITAN was the first card in that family to debut. That card featured 6GB of video RAM (double that of the closely-related GTX 780) and radically-improved double-precision compute performance over the rest of the GeForce 700 family, which justified its $1,000 price tag.
Your author still thinks the OG Titan was the best-looking FE card.
Future TITAN cards dropped the double-precision compute support, but they typically were positioned at the top of their respective product stacks, and usually featured extra memory onboard compared to their regular numbered GeForce siblings.
With that said, there hasn't been a new Titan card since the Titan RTX, which was based on Turing. That card is nearly four years old, and struggles to compete with the GeForce RTX 3080, to say nothing of the RTX 3090 or even 4090. You could definitely argue that the GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 4090 are "Titan-class"—your author certainly would—but there's something special about having the Titan nameplate on a card that really gives it a premium feeling.
Of course, none of this precludes the existence of such a card—it simply won't be called "Titan," and probably won't have 48GB of memory onboard. Most of the rumors around a potential improvement on the RTX 4090 have referred to the product as the RTX 4090 Ti, and that card could still come out if NVIDIA feels the need to recapture the top spot on some particular benchmark. There's a fair bit of clock headroom in the AD102 chip, and there are fully 14 shader modules disabled in the RTX 4090.