Get a Zotac RTX 3090 Ti Extreme Holo for £1188 (was £1879)
Of course, there’s no telling how fast the rumoured RTX 4090 will be, but I can guess that you’ll be paying a whackton more than £1200 for it - and probably paying again in the form of a higher energy bill if the leaks of its enlarged TDP (potentially 600W) are to be believed.
Beyond this kind of speculation though, we do know that the 3090 Ti is the fastest consumer GPU on the market now, operating in the same league as AMD’s RX 6950 XT in rasterised performance but blowing far beyond it in terms of RT performance. The 3090 Ti tends to be about 7-11 percent ahead of the RTX 3090 in terms of my testing for Digital Foundry, so you’re actually getting a better deal than the cheapest RTX 3090 Scan has in stock in terms of pounds per frame.
You’re also getting 24GB of VRAM, which makes the RTX 3090 Ti a really nice choice for content creators - this much VRAM goes a long way for producing 4K video, for instance, which is why DF’s editors use this card or the similarly endowed 3090 in their own editing rigs despite the high cost.
Nevertheless, even if you’re not in the market for a new GPU, it’s fascinating to see how even these titanic flagship cards are coming down in price rapidly. I can’t wait to see what the next-gen looks like, but until then you can pick up the cream of this generation for a dramatically lower price than early adopters suffered.
