NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Custom Models Production Reportedly Halted Amidst BIOS & Design Issues

According to multiple sources, NVIDIA has asked its board partners to halt the production of their upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti custom graphics cards.

Based on reports from TweakTown's and Videocardz's sources, it looks like NVIDIA has asked their board partners to stop the production of their upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 Ti custom models. The graphics card was announced a few weeks back at CES 2022 and NVIDIA stated that they will have more information (specs/pricing/availability) later this month. AIBs were also expected to announce their own custom models though that may possibly be delayed based on this new report.

According to Videocardz, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti issues are related to the BIOS and the hardware design which means that it is not only a software-related issue but also a fault within the reference PCB design that's passed over to AIBs to develop their custom models around. NVIDIA is not making just one PCB for its Founders Edition boards but they also design a reference PCB for AIBs which can be used as a basis to develop their own PCB designs. This however hasn't panned well in favor of NVIDIA and the PCB is now showcasing design flaws due to which production needs to be halted.

There are several changes that NVIDIA has made to the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti if earlier leaks are correct. Not only does it feature a full GA102 GPU core but it also comes with a brand new PCB design that utilizes dual-capacity 2 GB GDDR6X dies with up to 21 Gbps speeds, an insane 450W TDP design, and also expected to feature a PCIe Gen 5 interface and power connector (16-pin). It's likely that one of those didn't work out as NVIDIA had planned.

NVIDIA has so far not confirmed any of these reports but they do get the benefit since they never officially announced the launch or availability date of the card itself. It was only announced that we will get to hear more about the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti later this month and that may still happen. The leaked launch date suggested the card to be fully unveiled on 27th January but embargoes & NDA's on unannounced cards get changed all the time (just like the countless specs for Ampere cards that we have seen before). Just earlier today, we saw Gigabyte list down several of its custom models at EEC so those may or may not be part of the batch that has been affected by the issues & may need to be recalled.

At the heart of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card lies the GA102 GPU. The GA102 is one of the many Ampere GPUs that we will be getting on the gaming segment. The GA102 GPU is the fastest gaming GPU that NVIDIA has produced. The GPU is based on Samsung's 8nm custom process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and features a total of 28 Billion transistors. It measures 628mm2 which makes it the 2nd biggest gaming GPU ever produced right below the Turing TU102 GPU.

The new shader core on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is 2.7x faster, the new RT cores are 1.7x faster while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than the previous generation Turing GPUs. The 2nd Generation RT core delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray-tracing performance & features twice the ray/triangles intersection with concurrent RT graphics and compute operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3090, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 84 SM units on its flagship which results in a total of 10,752 CUDA cores (vs 82 SM / 10496 cores on RTX 3090 Non-Ti). In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti also comes packed with next-generation RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multi-processor units. The GPU runs at a base clock speed of 1560 MHz and a boost clock speed of 1860 MHz. The card has a TDP of 450W.

In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti comes packed with 240 GB of memory and that too the next-generation GDDR6X design. With Micron's latest and greatest graphics memory dies, the RTX 3090 Ti can deliver GDDR6X memory speeds of 21 Gbps. That along with a bus interface of 384-bit will deliver a cumulative bandwidth of 1008 Gbps.

The card will be available in both reference and custom flavors at launch but considering the existing market situation, expect retail prices to vary between $2500-$3000 US. There aren't any performance numbers that NVIDIA is sharing right now but from what has been showcased, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is faster than the RTX 3090 Non-Ti and also displaces the RX 6900 XT.