Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti Review ft. MSI & Palit

1. Introduction2. MSI RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X3. Palit RTX 3090 Ti GameRock OC4. Testing Methodology5. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy6. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing7. Assassin's Creed Valhalla8. Cyberpunk 20779. Dying Light 210. F1 202111. Far Cry 612. Forza Horizon 513. God of War14. Horizon Zero Dawn15. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy16. Red Dead Redemption 217. Resident Evil Village18. Total War: Warhammer III19. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition22. Ray Tracing: Resident Evil: Village23. MSI Suprim X vs Palit GameRock OC24. Clock Speed25. GPU Temperatures26. Memory Temperatures27. Acoustics28. Noise-Normalised Temperatures29. Power Draw: 1080p30. Power Draw: 1440p31. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)32. Performance per Watt: 1080p33. Performance per Watt: 1440p34. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)35. Total System Power Draw36. Overclocking37. Closing Thoughts38. View All Pages

While the RTX 3090 Ti was officially announced back at CES 2022, we've had to wait until now to hear more about Nvidia's new flagship GPU. That's right, the RTX 3090 Ti launches today, and we are checking out both the MSI Suprim X and Palit GameRock OC models. But how much faster is this new card compared to the RTX 3090? And will it really guzzle 450W of power? We discuss all that and more in this review.

We've mentioned that this is a ‘new' GPU, which I suppose is technically true, but the reality is the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti is using the same GA102 silicon we have been familiar with ever since the launch of the RTX 3080 10GB and RTX 3090 24GB back in September 2020. Yes, it has been tweaked with a few extra cores, higher clocks and faster memory, but it's very much an Ampere GPU, fabbed on Samsung's 8nm process, so don't expect wild performance gains over the vanilla RTX 3090.

Due to the increase in power draw however, the two cards we are looking at today are easily the largest I have ever seen, with both the MSI RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X and the Palit RTX 3090 Ti GameRock OC dwarfing even the RTX 3080 Ti. We take a closer look at each of these days in the subsequent pages of this review.

	RTX 3090 Ti	RTX 3090	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 3080	RTX 3070
SMs	84	82	80	68	46
CUDA Cores	10752	10496	10240	8704	5888
Tensor Cores	336	328	320	272	184
RT Cores	84	82	80	68	46
Texture Units	336	328	320	272	184
ROPs	112	112	112	96	96
GPU Boost Clock	1860 MHz	1695 MHz	1665 MHz	1710 MHz	1725 MHz
Memory Data Rate	21 Gbps	19.5 Gbps	19 Gbps	19 Gbps	14 Gbps
Total Video Memory	24GB GDDR6X	24GB GDDR6X	12GB GDDR6X	10GB GDDR6X	8GB GDDR6
Memory Interface	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	1008 GB/Sec	936 GB/Sec	912 GB/Sec	760 GB/Sec	448 GB/Sec
TGP	450W	350W	350W	320W	220W

Let's first recap the exact makeup of this GPU however. We've mentioned the RTX 3090 Ti uses GA102 silicon, but it's the first time we have seen a fully populated die. That means the RTX 3090 Ti incorporates 84 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and thanks to Ampere’s SM structure with its two FP32 datapaths, each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, giving a total of 10752. This is an increase of 256 cores compared to the RTX 3090, an extra 2.4%.

Ampere also places one RT core, and four Tensor cores, in each SM, giving a total of 84 RT cores and 336 Tensor cores. This is accompanied by 336 texture units and 112 ROPs which are housed directly within each graphics processing cluster (GPC), with 16 ROPs per GPC, and 7 GPCs in total for RTX 3090 Ti.

Clock speed is another area where Nvidia has made improvements compared to the RTX 3090. The RTX 3090 Ti has a reference clock of 1860 MHz, a boost of 165 MHz against the RTX 3090, though both of the partner cards we test come factory overclocked. We test real-world clock speed behaviour later in this review.

For the memory, Nvidia is using the same 384-bit bus as found with the RTX 3090. The memory allocation itself remains with 24GB of GDDR6X, but the kicker is these modules themselves have been upgraded to new 21Gbps chips. This brings total memory bandwidth up to over 1TB/s, hitting 1008GB/s to be precise.

Lastly, for total graphics power, Nvidia rates the RTX 3090 Ti for 450W, an increase of 100W, or 28.6% compared to the vanilla RTX 3090. Both cards we are looking at today push this further still, with a 480W power limit for the Suprim X, and a 460W limit for the GameRock OC. Of course, we are on hand to utilise our best ever GPU power testing methodology, so read on for our most detailed power testing yet.

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