Nvidia must be feeling pretty secure, sitting atop the list of the best graphics cards in this generation. That trend is likely to continue, what with AMD possibly stepping down from the high-end GPU race — but Nvidia might still surprise us. According to RedGamingTech, Nvidia is working on a GPU referred to as “Titan AI,” and it sounds like the most monstrous card we’ve ever seen. Another reputable leaker just confirmed that theory.
The YouTuber shed some light on the performance figures we might see in the RTX 50-series, focusing on how much each GPU will outperform its predecessor. These numbers refer to straight-up rasterization with no accounting for ray tracing, and RedGamingTech wasn’t sure whether they came from gaming tests or a synthetic benchmark.
Let’s start from the top. The rumored Titan AI is said to be a 63% improvement over the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5090 will follow with a 48% boost. The RTX 5080 may be up to 29% faster than the RTX 4080 Super and the RTX 5070 — and up to 26% faster than the RTX 4070 Super. These numbers fall in line with some previous leaks, but that’s all they are — a leak.
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The Titan AI is an especially interesting entry in the lineup, though, and it’s now also been confirmed by frequent GPU leaker kopite7kimi.
The big thing exists.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 23, 2024
Kopite7kimi speculated that while the GPU exists, it’s unclear whether Nvidia will ever actually sell it. That tracks — after all, despite many rumors, Nvidia never released a Titan GPU in the Ada generation. It also never ended up using the full AD102 die. There was enough juice to make an RTX 4090 Ti or a Titan card, but, if the leakers are correct, Nvidia chose not to. There could be many reasons behind such a decision, from high production costs to a low demand for such cards. Without a significant uplift, the RTX 4090 would have remained the go-to for consumers, and those who needed data center GPUs wouldn’t have bought a Titan card anyway.
The existence of a Titan AI GPU would explain the many different reports as to the bus width on the RTX 5090. The leakers initially started out by claiming we’d get a 512-bit bus, but conflicting reports claimed 448-bit and 384-bit widths, too. It’s possible that the 512-bit version only exists in the Titan card, and the RTX 5090 has a different memory bus and fewer CUDA cores.
I think we won’t see RTX 50 until CES.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 22, 2024
The specs and the release date of the RTX 50-series both remain a mystery. Rumor has it that AMD might not launch new GPUs until 2025, and kopite7kimi recently claimed that Nvidia is also waiting until 2025. If that is the case, we might not know more until a few months from now.