Why Zotac’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti might be a fake

As if the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti weren’t enough, an RTX 3090 Ti could now be on the way as well, according to various speculations. That this is probably not the case, can be clarified quite quickly, because I have checked all my sources. The leak of the supposed NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti was originally published by PC Mania (Japan) and was further distributed via Videocardz. References to an “RTX 3090 Ti” from the ZOTAC FireStorm Overclocking Utility were found in the “resources” directory, which only contains images used by the software.

ZOTAC adds GeForce RTX 3090Ti, RTX 3080Ti and RTX 3070Ti to its FireStorm software https://t.co/W6pnfVxgJr

— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) May 18, 2021

The logos found on file for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, 3080 Ti, and “3090 Ti” were all created at the same time, April 21, 2021. However, according to the “leak”, it is not known when the updated FireStorm software with these new files was made available, as no changelog is available. So much for that.

Back to the “RTX 3090 Ti”. The leak posits a full GA102 build like the Quadro RTX A6000 with 48GB of GDDR6X, which would be possible per se as a chip but still rather unlikely. On top of that would be the utopian memory expansion, which is also unrealistic (and probably uncoolable) due to the non-existent 2GB modules of GDDR6X memory. The card would also somewhat contradict NVIDIA’s own strategy of pushing a more affordable variant of the RTX 3090 into the professional range with the Quadro RTX A5000. You’re hardly going to cannibalize your way to the top.

I asked all possible board partners except Zotac about such a card and got among other things as an answer that it is very unlikely that just Zotac as the only supplier would have received information about a model about which all competitors were not informed yet. It should therefore be a mere placeholder in the software and/or a joke by the programmers. So all these speculations about the “RTX 3090 Ti” are not plausible, especially not against the background of ignorant AIC. Aside from a general amusement at the wave this supposed leak has since made, in the end there’s no real insight into whether NVIDIA ever even considered such a card.

Zotac is certainly not NVIDIA’s biggest and most important partner compared to the AIC I was able to interview. It could be that I’m wrong, along with all the interviewees from the competitors’ laboratories, but at the moment everything speaks for the usual HOAX, when boredom has arisen again. Thus, an “RTX 3090 Ti” or even “RTX Titan A” would be just another unicorn that you can’t shoot down. But it was at least worth a try.