Last year, Nvidia was so concerned about the potential of AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT that it was prepared to sacrifice a fully functional GA102 GPU for it as well as lower sales of the GeForce RTX 3090 with a 20GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

Jenkins, et al.

Fortunately for Jen-Hsun and the poor sacrificial GA102 lambs, the Radeon RX 6900 XT was a triple-fan silicon dud, and Nvidia quickly dropped all initial RTX 3080 Ti plans. Nvidia now has these GPUs into proper RTX 3090 cards, and one such chip has appeared under the cooler of a card picked up by a HardwareLuxx community member.

This suggests that the original Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti was very close to retail, and the Green team had all new GA102 GPUs minted with a slightly cut down GA102 GPU stamped "GA-102-250". But what is a graphics card manufacturer to do when it turns out that it doesn't need to hack a fully functional chip to deal with a powerful competitor? Literally erase the old names, stick those chips back under the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition shroud, make even more money, and hope no one notices.

Shortly after the release of the first RTX 30 series cards, there were many rumors about a 20GB version of the RTX 3080 Ti. At the time, it seemed odd that Nvidia might take such a step given the inevitable cannibalization of most RTX 3090 sales, but it shows how worried the GeForce team was about the promised RX 6900 XT.

We spoke with a graphics card manufacturer last year who expressed surprise that a 20GB card was pulled from the list at such a late stage. However, I was unaware that the card was about to be released. The cards were essentially mounted on boards, boxed, and ready to be shipped.

It seems pretty unprecedented to me that they were this close to releasing new graphics cards and then turn around and shut down the entire line. However, if Nvidia knew that they could repurpose these GPUs and bring them back to RTX 3090, it is clear that Nvidia would not lose money. [However, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is rumored to be launching this May with another sliced-up GPU (said to be the GA-102-225), fewer cores, and much less graphics memory. This time, though, it will be a different launch, not necessarily with AMD's cards in mind, but because the RTX 3090 is overdue for some sunbathing.