The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is the most powerful graphics card on the market right now, especially in workloads that involve ray tracing, but we’ve just seen a rumor that an RTX 3090 Super may be on the way.
According to Wccftech, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Super will reportedly be a graphics card with a whopping 400W TGP (total graphics power), and 10,752 CUDA cores – compared to the standard card’s 10,496 CUDA cores and 350W TGP. The leak comes from Twitter leaker @Greymon55, and we’ve never seen their leaks, so take this with a giant grain of salt.
That’s not to mention that the specs seem a little funky. With 10,752 CUDA cores, you’re looking at just 2 more Compute Units at 84 than the RTX 3090’s 82. That isn’t entirely unrealistic, as that’s the same exact difference as the RTX 2080 Super had over the original RTX 2080. But when Nvidia launched the RTX 2080 Super, it only increased the power budget by 25W over the Founder’s Edition GeForce RTX 2080.
It’s possible that, assuming this graphics card is even real, Nvidia will simply round up the power requirement to 400W, rather than releasing a GPU with a 375W TGP, but we don’t know why that would be necessary. Then again, this is still early days, so it’s possible that’s just what the GPU is requiring now. Who knows.
Do we really need this?
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is in weird spot right now. When the graphics card came out it was already not really worth the increased price over the RTX 3080, just in terms of a raw performance increase. But, now that we have the RTX 3080 Ti, that performance lead has only shrunk. For the most part, the RTX 3080 Ti will get you nearly the same level of performance in games than the RTX 3090, with maybe a 1-2% difference in frame rate.
Combine that with the lower retail price – even though you won’t find either graphics card at their retail price – and the RTX 3090 simply doesn’t make sense unless you really need that 24GB of VRAM.
I still don’t know if the RTX 3090 Super is going to be real, but if it is, it’s possible that Nvidia would release it to just give the top-end more room to breathe. And, if Nvidia’s release schedule with Ampere is anything like what it was with Turing (and it hasn’t been so far), the RTX 3090 Super wouldn’t be alone.
When Nvidia launched the RTX 2080 Super, it launched the RTX 2070 Super and the RTX 2060 Super at the same time. If Nvidia does that again, with an RTX 3080 Super and an RTX 3070 Super, the RTX 3090 is going to need something to make it stand out at its exorbitant price point.
Then again, there’s a pretty decent chance that this graphics card will never see the light of day – Nvidia hasn’t even launched a budget Ampere card yet, after all. So, we’ll just have to wait and see what Team Green has in store.
