NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at CES in January this year, and we reviewed several custom designs from the board partners exactly one month ago on March 29. Today, we have the Founders Edition review for you. NVIDIA isn't sending out samples of this card, so we bought one to answer several questions about the green team's flagship until the release of GeForce 4000.

Architecturally, the RTX 3090 Ti is based on the same GA102 GPU as the RTX 3090 non-Ti, but with more GPU cores enabled (10,752 vs. 10,496), and more tensor and RT cores. NVIDIA also upgraded the memory from 19.5 Gbps to 21 Gbps using the same 384-bit memory interface. Compared to the RTX 3090 non-Ti, the power limits have been increased by 100 W, to 450 W on the Founders Edition. The custom designs we tested go even further and allow up to 480 W out of the box.

Averaged over our 25 game test suite at 4K resolution, we find the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition 8% faster than the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. These are solid gains, but considerably lower than what we saw from the custom designs during our day one reviews (MSI +10%, Zotac +11%, EVGA, and ASUS +12%). It seems NVIDIA was fairly conservative with their clocks and power limits, which is a bit surprising given the positioning of the RTX 3090 Ti. In real-life gameplay, it'll be difficult to subjectively notice a difference between the cards, we're talking a few FPS more or less here, but the same could also be said for picking the RTX 3090 non-Ti over the Ti. Against AMD's offerings, the RTX 3090 Ti is 15% faster than the Radeon RX 6900 XT; it will be interesting to see if the upcoming Radeon RX 6950 XT will be able to beat that; reviews are coming soon. Against the Radeon RX 6800 XT, the RTX 3090 Ti is 20% faster. 4K is pretty much the only resolution that makes sense for the RTX 3090 Ti. Maybe 1440p if you have a high-refresh-rate monitor and really want the FPS, but you've got to make sure you pair the card with a strong CPU that can feed frames to the GPU quickly enough. At lower resolutions, the RTX 3090 Ti is just too CPU limited; you can see this in our benchmark results where all cards are bunched up against an invisible wall.

NVIDIA is betting big on ray tracing. The RTX 3090 Ti uses the same second-generation Ampere RT architecture as the other GeForce 30 cards, but owing to its enormous rendering power, it achieves higher FPS with ray tracing, too. Compared to AMD Radeon, the Ampere architecture executes more ray tracing operations in hardware, so they run faster, which gives the RTX 3090 Ti a large advantage over the RX 6900 XT, especially in first-generation ray tracing titles. Recent game releases come with toned down ray tracing effects, so they run well on the AMD-powered consoles, too. Here, the gap shrinks, but NVIDIA still has the upper hand.

Just like the RTX 3090, the RTX 3090 Ti comes with 24 GB of VRAM, which is more than any other consumer card on the market. AMD's high-end Radeon cards come with 16 GB, and the RTX 3080 Ti has 12 GB. The RTX 3080 offers 10 GB. While 10 GB is starting to become a bottleneck in a few specific games with RT enabled, more than 16 GB doesn't help in any game so far. There are several professional application scenarios, like rendering huge scenes, that benefit from 24 GB. Nearly all GPU render software requires that the whole scene fits into GPU memory—if it doesn't fit, you won't get any output or the app will crash. 24 GB offers additional headroom, so you can tackle bigger problems, but optimizing the textures or geometry of your scene is always an option to reduce the VRAM requirement. Rendering on the CPU as a last resort is also possible, but it will take considerably longer compared to when the GPU is accelerating the workloads, of course. The vast majority of our readers are gamers. If you are a professional needing that much memory, do let us know. I'm curious what you are working on.

Visually, the NVIDIA GeForce 30 Founders Edition designs are among the most beautiful graphics cards ever created. The company did a great job combining various metal color shades for their FE thermal solution and fused all components into a single product with an impeccable industrial design. It not only looks good, but is also surprisingly maintainable for such a design as long as you have the required screwdrivers. With GeForce 30, NVIDIA pioneered a through-flow air-cooling concept that has air pass through the graphics card to improve full-system thermals. The RTX 3090 Ti's heat output is very high though, which makes the cooler work much harder than expected. The original RTX 3090 non-Ti Founders Edition ran very quietly, especially for a reference design, and often ended up the better choice than much bigger custom designs. This isn't exactly the case for the RTX 3090 Ti FE. With 42 dBA under full load, the card is fairly loud, which of course isn't unreasonable for a card of this performance class. Custom designs from ASUS, EVGA, and Zotac are roughly as noisy, though—not impressive, either. That having been said, the latter have the dual BIOS feature, which lets people activate a "quiet" BIOS with reduced noise levels. The only truly quiet RTX 3090 Ti is the MSI RTX 3090 Ti SuprimX—highly recommended if you want low noise. Looking at the load temperature of 74°C, I think NVIDIA was a bit too focused on keeping temperatures low, and sacrificed noise levels for it. Historically, Founders Edition cards were always running close to the thermal target of 83°C—had NVIDIA allowed those additional 9°C, the fan could operate much quieter. What's a complete non-issue now are memory temperatures, which were quite high on some RTX 3090 non-Ti cards. NVIDIA is now using higher-density memory chips, so only half as many are needed, which means no more chips on the back side of the card. As expected, the RTX 3090 Ti FE includes idle fan stop—the card will stop its fans completely during idle, desktop work, internet browsing, and even light gaming.

Keep in mind that you need decent case ventilation for the RTX 3090 Ti. Heat output of around 450 W needs to be exhausted, or the heat build-up will make your card throttle. Assuming future graphics card generations will use just as much power, this will be an interesting challenge for case designers. NVIDIA's power limit settings are very conservative, though. Despite the powerful 18+3 phase VRM design, NVIDIA doesn't allow any power limit increases on the Founders Edition, which is a shame as it would have allowed overclockers to gain some additional performance at the cost of some efficiency. Energy efficiency of the RTX 3090 Ti is considerably lower than most other Ampere cards, and roughly 20% worse than AMD's offerings. NVIDIA's Founders Edition does have better energy efficiency than many custom designs due to more conservative settings which operate the GPU closer to its optimum efficiency point. The RTX 3090 non-Ti FE is less energy efficient than the RTX 3090 Ti FE because the non-Ti model has twice the number of memory chips, and I suspect NVIDIA is using higher-binned chips on the Ti model. The whole 12-pin/16-pin power connector drama before release turned out to be for naught as the card runs perfectly fine with the bundled 3x 8-pin adapter; NVIDIA made sure the card performs its best even when the four sense pins on the new connector are not connected.

The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition is currently available at its MSRP of $2000, which is A LOT of money. The RTX 3090 non-Ti has come down in pricing to $1700 now—a $300 gap for a few percent additional performance and more convenient memory cooling configuration seems like a tough value proposition. On the other hand, people who are seriously interested in RTX 3090 Ti just want the best and probably consider pricing secondary. Spending $2000 on a graphics card for your favorite hobby is possible for most middle-class workers in western countries, and those are not even considered "rich." Whether there is a reasonable "return on investment" (your gaming joy) compared to the RTX 3080, RX 6800 XT, and similar for less than half the price is questionable, though. Graphics card prices have come down a lot in recent months, and AMD's RX 6900 XT is selling for slightly above $1000, though it performs 15% worse, and with "only" 16 GB VRAM. AMD is launching their new Radeon RX 6950 XT very soon. Given the lower real-world prices of AMD GPUs, it's extremely unlikely that AMD will release their new flagship at $2000 (twice the RX 6900 XT MSRP), so the coming few weeks will be very interesting if you're in the market for the fastest cost-no-object gaming graphics card.