NVIDIA At CES 2022: RTX 3090 Ti, $249 RTX 3050, RTX 3080 12GB and RTX 3070 Ti 16GB Desktop GPUs Announced

NVIDIA held their big CES 2022 press conference this morning where they launched several new GPUs along with giving us a glimpse into their other ventures. By far, the most exciting announcement from the show came in the form of a new entry-level GPU along with the new BFGPU that is sure to scalp for insane prices. From the fastest mobile GPU to ever exist to 10 new games getting RTX support, here’s a detailed rundown of everything NVIDIA announced at CES 2022. This article only covers desktop releases, you can check out the laptop announcements here.

RTX 3090 Ti

After numerous leaks andworrying reports about delays, NVIDIA finally made the RTX 3090 Ti official at their CES show. The company’s new BFGPU is the monstrous flagship of every gamer’s dream. It features and utilizes a full-fat GA-102 die which allows it to have 10,752 CUDA Cores and 84 GPU clusters. The card also features 24GB of GDDR6X memory from Micron, which was leaked earlier. That memory is clocked at 21 Gbps, higher than the RTX 3090, enabling the card to break the 1TB/s memory bandwidth barrier.

The card has a base clock of 1560Mhz and a boost clock of 1860Mhz with an insane 450W TGP. That is a whole 100W more than the RTX 3090 so be sure to check your power supplies before you make the purchase. RTX 3090 Ti makes use of a 16-pin power connector replacing the hideous 12-pin and the standard 8-pin power connector found on other GPUs. But, fear not as NVIDIA has apparently designed their best Founder’s Edition cooling system ever to keep the monster in control. It uses a full aluminum alloy heatsink which creates a hybrid vapor chamber with dual-sided axial-tech-based fans.

NVIDIA actually didn’t announce all of those specs at their show as their reveal was more of a tease than an actual launch. We just have all the specs thanks to previous leaks. The company will share more information about the GPU as the weeks go along as it’s currently planning a Q1 2022 release but it expect it to be towards the tail end of that quarter. Pricing was also not disclosed but speculations point at a number around the $2000 mark, and considering how MSRPs don’t really hold any value these days, you already know this baby is about to be scalped to oblivion.

RTX 3050

This is technically the only “new” GPU announced at the virtual press conference as the 3090 Ti and the mobile GPUs are all just refreshes of existing SKUs. Technically because it still uses the same GA-106 die found in the RTX 3060, but a cut-down version of it. It features 2560 CUDA Cores and 20 SM units along with 8GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14Gbps. That gives the card a 224GB/s bandwidth across a 128-bit wide bus interface. It also has only a 130W TGP which should make it pretty efficient.

Performance-wise, we’re looking at the next natural evolution of the xx50 class card, meaning that it’s cheaper than previous gen’s xx60 class card while offering on-par performance. That’s exactly what’s happening here as the GPU is as powerful as a GTX 1070 Ti, which itself is almost as powerful as a RTX 2060. NVIDIA compared the card against the GTX 1650 and GTX 1050, both of which got absolutely decimated in benchmarks against the RTX 3050. Oh, and of course, it actually features ray-tracing as opposed to the aforementioned SKUs.

By far the highlight of this card is its price, or its value proposition. NVIDIA is suggesting a retail price of $249 which is very enticing considering this is basically just a RTX 2060 but with better ray-tracing. But, you and I both know how that story is going to go, so let’s just hope better times are ahead. The RTX 3050 will be available starting January 27th and won’t have a Founder’s Edition, instead it will be exclusively sold through board partners, some of which are pictured below.

RTX 3070 Ti 16GB & RTX 3080 12GB

NVIDIA didn’t announce these two GPUs at their virtual event, but later in a press release. That’s understandable because these two SKUs didn’t really need any limelight on the show floor as they are just minor refreshes of existing hardware. Literally the only notable difference here compared to their contemporaries is the memory and that’s it.

The RTX 3070 Ti 16GB has, as the name suggests, 16GB of GDDR6X memory from Micron clocked in at 21Gbps across a 256-bit interface that allows the card to have 672GB/s of bandwidth. That’s 10% more than the standard 8GB variant of the RTX 3070 Ti. The card is expected to have the same TGP as the normal 3070 Ti, with possibly a 10W increase to bump the TGP to 300W, but this is unconfirmed at the moment. Rest of the specifications are almost identical to the point where the ever-so-slight discrepancy is not worth pointing out as it won’t translate to real-world performance.

As for the RTX 3080 12GB, there is a 3% increase in CUDA Core count from its standard 10GB variant, 8690 Cores as compared to 8704. We’re also looking at 2 more RT Cores and 8 more TMUs, but once again, this difference is negligible in the real-world. Lastly, the card is suggested to have a 350W TGP, which is 30W higher than its contemporary.

The memory difference is a bit more nuanced in the RTX 3080 as not only does it upgrade the memory capacity from 10GB to 12GB, the new variant also has a wider 384-bit bus which allows the card to have a 912Gbps clock speed, compared to the 10GB variant’s 760Gbps. That’s quite the improvement, 20% to be exact, and will certainly help deliver better performance where it matters.

We don’t have any word on pricing or availability for this SKU. All we know is that a Q1 2022 release is planned and there is a chance that the price remains the same as the 3070 Ti 8GB, which is to say $599. On the other hand, we do know that the RTX 3080 12GB is supposed to launch on 11th January, 2022 but with no concrete price in sight; reports suggest it could retail for as high as $999 which is $300 more than the RTX 3080 10GB.

Those were all the desktop announcement from NVIDIA’s CES 2022. The company also unveiled two new mobile GPUs: RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti, the latter of which is purportedly the most powerful mobile GPU to have ever been created. Apart from the green team, both Intel and AMD also had very fulfilling press conferences which we will be covering in detail as well. And that’s not it as there is more juicy info coming out of CES every moment so stay tuned for all the latest coverage!