Nvidia reportedly stopped production and launch of GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, allegedly problems were discovered

–

Nvidia has encountered problems in producing graphics, which is to be the new most powerful card of the Ampere generation. It is not yet clear how long it will take to repair them and when the card will be able to start selling.

Nvidia last week at CES 2022 announced GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, the new most powerful graphics of the Ampere generation. So far only preliminary (we have parameters, for example, but only from an unofficial source), but more was to be revealed this month and 27.1 was probably to be a real launch. But the premiere seems to be postponed, Nvidia reportedly ran into problems and suddenly suspended the beginning of card production. It is not clear how much delay will occur.

The warning message about the GeForce RTX 3090 was first issued by TweakTown, but then the VideoCardz website added that it managed to verify the same with its informants (unless they are the same…). What’s going on? GeForce RTX 3090 cards were supposed to start production, but Nvidia has now stopped the process and informed the card manufacturer that they should stop production. This is not a cancellation, but only a temporary suspension, but it is a very unusual thing.

The revelation at CES 2022 has not yet promised a direct release this month, only “more information January 27”, so this will not be a postponement of the publicly announced date. However, the company allegedly had another revelation planned under the NDA this week, so it is possible that the parameters and the date when the model will start selling should have been announced at this time. However, according to TweakTown, the marketing campaign was canceled due to the suspension of launch plans.

Card BIOS and hardware problems?

The reason why Nvidia is suspending production is that with the GeForce RTX 3090, there are reportedly some issues that probably won’t be resolved at the driver level. According to VideoCardz, its sources have confirmed that there are some problems or changes to the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti firmware, but at the same time there is a purely hardware problem. The manufacturers are now said to be waiting for Nvidia to move with a solution.

The reason for stopping production is, in case of firmware problems, that the already repaired version can be loaded into the cards during production and users do not have to do so with some manually downloaded and running tool. However, hardware problems could be more serious – they could require some PCB modification, so the need to shut down production lines would be even more urgent.

The sources of these sites do not say exactly what the problem should be. It should probably not be an erratum, ie a fundamental error in the chip. GeForce RTX 3090 Ti does not use the new GPU, it is just a fully activated chip from RTX 3080 (Ti) and RTX 3090 graphics, and it also runs at higher beats. However, the RTX 3090 Ti configuration runs at the same power consumption on the same chip. The TDP of the non-overclocked reference card should be 450 W according to leaks – in order to get higher cycles and higher power from the GPU.

It is theoretically possible that with this increase in rates and consumption they returned stability problems that GPU Ampere had from the beginning in 2020 (solved it driver level change, probably adjusting boost control). It is probably not easy to ensure a stable voltage from the supply cascade at such power and current levels.

GDDR6X memories could be the second possible source of problems. According to the leaked gossip, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is supposed to operate at the highest frequency yet – at 21.0 GHz efficiently instead of 19.5 GHz in the RTX 3090. Again, it is theoretically possible that it turned out that this planned frequency is not with the GA102 chip controller and PCB designed for completely stable cards.

The launch of the card will probably be later than planned

It is not clear how long the delay will be, but the kinds of problems that could arise could be eliminated by Nvidia relatively quickly. The cessation of production probably means that the start of card sales will have to be postponed a bit, but the delay could probably only be a few weeks.

Nvidia could probably wait until a new release date is set and then the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will start selling until the solution to these issues is developed and verified.

Resources: TweakTown, VideoCardz