Rumor mill: The God-level RTX 4090 Ti or Lovelace Titan many have been expecting has reportedly been put on hold by Nvidia because it was tripping breakers, melting PSUs and occasionally dissolving. It’s believed that when (if) it does arrive, the card might be one of the first to pack GDDR7 memory.
With its 450W TDP, $1,600 MSRP, and 24GB of GDDR6X clocked at 21 Gbps, the RTX 4090 is a monster in every respect. However, we’d heard plenty of rumors before Ampere’s launch of a Lovelace flagship with 48GB of memory@24 Gbps and a TGP of 900W.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, which can admittedly be a bit hit-and-miss with its claims, this card is the Titan Ada. The channel cites a source that has proved “more than legit” over the last six months, so take it all with some salt.
The source adds that the Titan Ada never had an 800W – 1,000W TGP like many claimed but was around 600W – 700W in testing. It was supposedly to be so big that the motherboard was usually mounted to the side of the card, as opposed to the card being seated in the motherboard. It’s also said to require two 16-pin power connectors, be four slots thick, and pack the full-fat AD102 GPU rather than the cut-down version found in the RTX 4090.
But it appears that the Titan Ada was simply too much card to handle, tripping power supplies, breaking PSUs, and melting. As such, the project has been canceled—at least for now.
It’s only a theory, but Nvidia could release a Titan Ada card in the future. The company might be waiting for 27 Gbps memory or GDDR7 to arrive first, allowing more CUDA cores without increasing power consumption. The Titans have traditionally been aimed more at creators, researchers, and enterprises, so even with those power demands and what will doubtlessly be a comically high price, it’ll likely still sell plenty of units.
In other graphics card news, we’ve just seen the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which can match the best of Nvidia’s current generation, drop below $700.