Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics card could be 50% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
(Image credit: TechRadar)

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 – if indeed that’s what the GPU ends up being called (we’ll talk more on the potential name later) – is apparently going to be hugely faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, according to the graphics grapevine.

In fact, the latest from a couple of well-known leakers on Twitter is that the incoming Ampere flagship graphics card will be ’up to’ around half as fast again compared to the 2080 Ti.

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As you can see, rumor has it (add your own salt, and plenty of it) that the RTX 3090 managed to achieve a score of close to 10,000 in TimeSpy Extreme, which represents a leap of about 50% or thereabouts over the RTX 2080 Ti.

That’s a pretty major performance boost from Turing to Ampere, and it roughly lines up with what we have recently heard about the RTX 3080 being around 20% faster than the 2080 Ti, and about 50% faster than the outgoing RTX 2080 (in 4K at least).

All of which, if it pans out, could prove a major headache for AMD in trying to compete with these new graphics cards with its Big Navi GPUs, with that flagship delivering considerably less oomph if the grapevine is to be believed (rumors point to around 10-15% better performance than the RTX 2080 Ti). 

What’s in a name?

Another interesting point here is that it’s rather surprising and odd to see the RTX 3090 name popping up again, seeing as most folks had seemingly abandoned the notion of this name change happening, and accepted that the GPU will likely be called the 3080 Ti.

We’ve covered the reasons why Nvidia adopting the 3090 label seems unlikely before, in some depth – and indeed we’ve seen a leaked photo of an early Asus GPU that was labeled as a 3080 Ti – although of course, all of this ultimately boils down to just rumors and speculation, so we can’t definitively rule anything out.

The point really, though, is that whatever this incoming GPU is going to be called, it’s presumably the successor to the 2080 Ti, or at least that’s what the rumor peddlers believe (which is why they are comparing it to that existing Turing card).

As some folks have mentioned in that Twitter thread, though, there is theoretically the chance that this could be the Ampere Titan graphics card, and the grapevine has got its wires crossed somewhere. As we’ve already mentioned, anything is possible really, and we should be very careful in putting too much stock in this rumor, and indeed the alleged TimeSpy Extreme benchmark itself.

Still, if the prevailing wind of ‘50% faster’ rumors ends up coming to fruition with Nvidia’s Ampere products, they’re really going to shake up the GPU arena, that’s for sure.

Via Wccftech

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).