At CES back in January, Nvidia announced two new desktop graphics cards. One of them, the lower-midrange RTX 3050, got pricing and a release date, and the reviews have already come and gone. The other, the tippy-top-end RTX 3090 Ti, had some of its specs announced, but the company said it would have more specifics “by the end of the month.”
But we’re now halfway into February, and the company still doesn’t have any news to share. An Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge that the company does not “currently have more info to share” on the speedy-but-almost-certainly-pricey flagship GPU.
This follows reports from mid-January that the company and its partners had halted production on the 3090 Ti due to alleged issues with the GPU’s BIOS and the hardware itself. Whether fixes can be applied to GPUs that have already been manufactured is unclear, but if the GPU die itself needs to be revised in some way, limited manufacturing capacity amid the ongoing global chip shortage could cause substantial delays.
This saga is only really notable because Nvidia seems to have missed its own deadline and not because it actually makes a difference to most people—whether RTX 3090 Ti retail listings exist or not, you wouldn’t be able to just go to a store or hop on a site and buy one. GPU pricing does seem to be slowly trending downward as of this writing, but it’s still likely to be a while before it’s easy to just buy one at its listed retail price. I’m not recommending that Nvidia paper launch the 3090 Ti before the actual hardware is ready! I’m just saying that in 2022 it would be awfully hard to tell the difference.