 GPU prices are falling is what I would say if not for the RTX 3090 Ti. Nvidia's latest and greatest. Look at this thing. It is massive. Just look at the cooler. It's like three slots, maybe three and a half. And I think there's like eight separate heat pipes here. It's bound to be the most powerful consumer card ever. But this time, we don't want to be a part of the hype machine that sells these things. Let me explain what I mean. But first, let me tell you about our sponsor. Smart Deploy. Smart Deploy provides out of the box Windows imaging support for over 1500 computer models. Deploy one Windows image to any hardware model with ease. Get your free licenses worth over $500 at smartdeploy.com. We'll be comparing the new Ti to the only GPU we really need to the RTX 3090, which is quite close in specification to the new big boy here. So close, in fact, that I had to triple check my notes. Yes, both have 24 gigs of GDDR6X memory, but the Ti pulls ahead of memory bandwidth to almost but not quite a terabyte per second. It also boasts an extra 2.4% more GPU cores that are thankfully clocked 10 to 12% higher and draws a staggering 29% higher total graphics power at 450 watts. To achieve that, Nvidia has resorted to a triple 8-pin to 12-pin dongle with a hefty 850 watt power supply requirement. They recommend a kilowatt. I was hoping our GPU test bench can handle that kind of load. In F1 2021, we're looking at a roughly 8 or 9% improvement over the RTX 3090 with ray tracing disabled, of course, which translates into about 10 FPS. When we enable ray tracing, the extra cores work their magic for a good 13% improvement, keeping things much closer to 60 FPS maxed out at 4K. Far Cry 6 sees a slightly less impressive result at around 5% or 6% with ray tracing disabled and just a little bit more with ray tracing turned on. Like the RTX 3090, Nvidia says that 8K gaming is one of the 3090 Ti's strong suits, but when I tried it out, F1 2021 chugged at around 30 FPS, so I didn't bother testing any further. Maybe productivity will show us a better example of how the power of the 3090 Ti will improve your life. Blender, hmm, doesn't seem to think so. We're looking at a few seconds at most, depending on what render you're using. V-Ray gives the 3090 Ti a slight lead too, although the RTX result is over 100 points more, so hooray, a whole 4% lead. OctaneRenderer gave us a similar kind of situation to these as well. It's whatever. Moving on to power, we ran 5 laps of F1 2021 as a typical gaming load, and we saw a power draw spike as high as 480 watts. That cannot be right. 480 watts? Really? Holy sh**. Yeah, and the average was over 400, not much lower than the peak wattage the RTX 3090 drew in this same test. To be fair to Nvidia, while that's an absurd amount of power, more than an entire PC with a low-end GPU might draw, it's roughly in line with the performance improvement we saw in that game, so you're getting frames proportionally in exchange for the extra juice. If the rumors are to be believed, we'll see even more power draw in search of higher frame rates when the next generation rolls out. Speaking of which, why is this GPU only launching now, when the 40 Series AIDA Lovelace GPUs are supposedly right around the corner? Well, I've got a few theories. Maybe this is an indication that AIDA isn't right around the corner, and Nvidia is trying to make do with what they've got. Or maybe the 3090 Ti was delayed for so long during the silicon shortage that it's launching way later than they planned. Or maybe they just had high-bend GPUs kicking around that they wanted to clear out before AIDA hit later this year. Our screwdriver and backpack are hitting later this year too. Sign up at LTDStore.com to be the first to know when they're ready. The GPU clear-out angle is a very likely one, IMO. Nvidia's existing A40, a data center GPU, shares most of its spec sheet with the 3090 Ti, albeit with a significantly lower board power and more but slower memory. Sure enough, the Nvidia control panel even has an ECC memory support toggle like you might find on one of those cards. While I don't have a problem with this in principle, I do have a problem with the price they're asking for it, and I'm not comfortable with how much power this thing is capable of drawing. Starting at $2,000 US MSRP, the EVGA one we tested costs $2,200. You're looking at a 25% premium or more over a GPU that is already priced like a Titan and already is not proportionally faster than the next card down the stack for the money. Nvidia wants us to compare against the Titan RTX, a card that already wasn't worth the price when it launched, and which didn't even live up to the Titan name with its crippled FP64 performance. That card, like this one, has more in common with the Titan XP, a card that also had crippled FP64 performance and launched at $1,200 US, $300 less than the RTX 3090. That is the RTX tax in a nutshell, and calling this a $500 price drop from the Titan RTX is a slap in the face to anyone who thought that the 3090 itself was already making that comparison. It's one thing to have a Halo product for the diehards, but when even that product gets eclipsed in terms of pricing, that's when we journey into the absurd. If many people thought that Nvidia had jumped the shark with the RTX 3090's $1,500 price tag, then they're now trying to see just how big a shark they can clear with the 3090 Ti. Especially with competition from AMD and Intel on the horizon, and with the RTX 3090 coming back down to earth in price, it feels like a cynical cash grab, no matter what their intention was. You'd be forgiven for losing track of just what GPUs even cost anymore with how crazy pricing has been over the past couple of years. After all, as recently as this month, RTX 3090s were going for over $3,000, sometimes over $4,000, easily double their original asking price. Now that's finally changing. The RTX 3090 is routinely going for $2,000 or less. Someone even got really lucky on this one. And so Nvidia read the room full of wary gamers and professionals trying to catch a break, and with a straight face, bragged to their investors that people were paying more for new GPUs, while slapping an astronomical price tag onto this thing. As for power, yeah, I get that just releasing an A40 with 24 gigs of VRAM for the consumer market wouldn't be very impressive next to the 3090. But this is just ridiculous. The EVGA card even has a thankfully unpopulated second ATX 3.0 power connector, which would theoretically give this thing access to over 1200 watts of power. It's a chilling look at a world where watts don't matter as long as you're getting frames. You'll note, however, that we didn't do very many benchmarks to find reasons for this thing to exist. That's because we didn't get our card until two business days before Embraergo Lift. And even if we got it sooner, the driver was only made available two days before that. The final version of the reviewer's guide was uploaded yesterday. Nvidia clearly did not want us to look too closely at the RTX 3090 Ti, and that's okay, because I'm not sure how much more I need to see. The worst part about all of this is that there's nothing that I can say or do that will prevent people from buying it. The RTX 3090 itself is already nearly half a percent of the Steam hardware survey. That is twice as many GPUs than the RX 6700 XT, and nearly so for the RTX 3050 Ti. If you expand it out, the desktop GA102 GPU that powers everything from the RTX 3080 to the 3090 Ti represents a combined total of nearly 2%. A big enough portion to put it in the top 10, people want the big boy. And I think we deserve some of the blame for that. I like how we deserve blame for our storage going haywire. Get subscribed so you don't miss our data recovery adventure, by the way. But if you want this thing, if you're one of the people that Nvidia says want the absolute best, then I don't know what to tell you. Perhaps money is no object, and you want to get as close to that 8K gaming promise as you can. Or maybe you want to get as close to that 8K gaming promise as you can. Or maybe that extra little bit of blood Nvidia squeezed from the stone is exactly what you need for peak productivity. I disagree. What is peak productivity is this segue to our sponsor. 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Maybe go grab a palette cleanser with our recent video on the G-Ray GPU accelerated NVMe solution. That one's actually really cool.