NVIDIA Is Allegedly Hoarding Top GPU Silicon For A GeForce RTX 4090 Ti With Monster Specs
A somewhat-less reasonable reason to avoid buying the RTX 4090 is the idea that NVIDIA might have a faster GPU waiting in the wings. However, that's exactly what the rumor mill is saying today. The latest leak from Twitter leaker AGF (@XpeaGPU on Twitter) is that NVIDIA is already saving the best AD102 dice for a purported future GeForce RTX 4090 Ti product.
According to the leaker, such a product would come with a raised 475-watt power limit to allow for a 2.75 GHz nominal boost. That would put the card's real boost clocks in the 2.95 GHz range, which is consistent with the 200 MHz or so gain nominal boost clocks. That bump in combination with the use of a fully-enabled AD102 die with 18176 shaders and 96 MB of L2 cache—up from 16384 and 72MB on the RTX 4090—should give a significant boost in raster performance.
Along with those spec increases, AGF seems to indicate that the card would move to 24 Gbps GDDR6X memory. We were a little surprised to see that the RTX 4090 uses the very same 21-Gbps GDDR6X memory as the RTX 3090 Ti—not that either card is particularly starved for memory bandwidth at nearly 1 TB/sec. According to the rumor, NVIDIA will bump the memory clock to 24 Gbps for the RTX 4090 Ti, giving that card about 15% more memory bandwidth.
All told, the suped-up specs of the purported RTX 4090 Ti result in a "10-20%" performance increase over the RTX 4090. Having just reviewed the thing, it's hard for us to even imagine that. The RTX 4090 utterly wipes the floor with all comers in every single test, both compute and gaming. Another 20% on top of that sounds almost absurd to the point of ridiculousness.
Still, you do have those people who will gladly pay out any price to have the absolute best, and a beast like this card should probably fit the bill. We have our doubts as to whether AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs can hold a candle to the extant GeForce RTX 4090 as it is. However, if AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat, NVIDIA may well have this beast ready to unleash in response.
