Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti suffers another setback — and it’s the RTX 3090’s fault

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Rumored Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti parts seemingly repurposed for the RTX 3090

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090
(Image credit: Nvidia)

The latest development in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti saga has suggested that, rather than being delayed to mid-May, the graphics card may have simply been scrapped — or at the very least, recycled.

As reported by Neowin, Hardwareluxx forum user isoO recently disassembled his Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition to find its original die marker — GA102-250 — crossed out and replaced by another, GA102-300. GA102-250 was heavily rumored to be the chip powering the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, indicating that Nvidia is repurposing the chips to produce RTX 3090 GPUs instead.

For those of you who’ve successfully found where to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, you shouldn’t worry too much about getting a graphics card that’s weaker than others of the same type. It always appeared that the GA102-250 was just a GA102-300 with certain features disabled. Nvidia could therefore simply re-enable these features to get it back up to GA102-300 level, even if the GA102-250 chips were “lower binned” (and thus of lower manufacturing quality) than the GA102-300.

However, this doesn’t look like particularly good news for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. If Nvidia is repurposing such a crucial component for another product, that would mean RTX 3080 Ti production is going to be heavily delayed at best or completely cancelled at worst. It’s possible that with the ongoing graphics card shortage, Nvidia felt it more prudent to get additional RTX 3090s out the door than split its attention with another high-end GPU.

A VideoCardz tweet suggested as much, citing a source that claimed Nvidia’s entire GA102-250 stock has been or will be repurposed for the RTX 3090.

That said, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti could still see the light of day, only with a completely different chip at its heart. One leak, reported by VideoCardz, detailed an alternative GA102-225 chip — this would have more in common with the GeForce RTX 3080’s GA102-200 than the RTX 3090’s chip, including its accompanying 12GB of GDDR6X memory instead of the originally rumored 20GB.

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James Archer
James Archer

James is currently Hardware Editor at Rock Paper Shotgun, but before that was Audio Editor at Tom’s Guide, where he covered headphones, speakers, soundbars and anything else that intentionally makes noise. A PC enthusiast, he also wrote computing and gaming news for TG, usually relating to how hard it is to find graphics card stock.