Witness the power of this fully operational GB202 chip.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
If this is true, it's surely what the new Nvidia RTX 5090 should have looked like. An engineering board of the RTX 5090 has been spotted with a fully unlocked GB202 GPU running no fewer than 24,576 CUDA cores. Yum.
That's a fairly hefty 13% bump on the 21,760 cores of the official RTX 5090. Prior to this alleged leak, the GB202 chip at the heart of the RTX 5090 was indeed thought to rock 24,576 cores. So, it all scans.
The leak comes from a user of the Chiphell forum (via Videocardz), which has been a rich mine of information for unreleased next-gen GPUs over recent years, albeit none of this is official or confirmed.
The engineering board has also been fitted out with zippy 32 Gbps GDDR7 memory, quicker than the 28 Gbps memory of the RTX 5090 you will shortly be able to buy. Well, you will if rumours of extremely short supply of Nvidia's new graphics cards don't turn out to be true.
Anyway, that works out to an upgrade from 1,792 GB/s to 2,048 GB/s for this engineering board, the better to keep those extra CUDA cores fed. This fully operational GB202 chip also represents a much bigger step over last gen's RTX 4090.
That has 16,384 CUDA cores, so, this maxxed out 5090 sports fully 50% more cores. What's more, the engineering board is rated at a monstrous 800 W, which suggests Nvidia hasn't had to clock the thing down too much, or rather implies this thing is running clocks close to the lower-core RTX 5090 retail board. If so, it will be a fantastically powerful GPU.
Of course, the catch here is that Nvidia also pegged the RTX 4090 back. The AD102 GPU in the 4090 has 18,432 cores, once again 13% more than the cut-down AD102 used in the retail 4090. And despite rumours of a 4090 Ti and indeed an example of an engineering board being rescued from landfill, Nvidia never released that chipset.
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The apparently confirmed existence of prototype 4090 Ti cards, then, both adds and subtracts weight from this leak. On the one hand, it shows that Nvidia does indeed make such cards. But it also demonstrates that Nvidia doesn't always fully unleash the power of its top GPU, even when it has done the leg work to make that possible.
For the 4090, that was arguably because AMD couldn't compete with its 7900 XTX, so there was no need for Nvidia to show its full hand. The problem with that theory? AMD definitely isn't going after the high end with its new RDNA 4 GPUs, so the RTX 5090 will be under even less pressure.
The exception to that notion is the building chorus of disappointment regarding the 5090. In the past 24 hours or so, numerous videos from the usual tech channels have been posted expressing various levels of apathy over the new RTX 5090 based on its quoted specs.
Had the 5090 offered a full GB202 from launch, that probably wouldn't have been the case. So, there's a PR opportunity for Nvidia in actually doing a full GB202, be that an RTX 5090 Ti or some kind of Titan card. It would be hella expensive, no doubt. But it would almost certainly knock complaints about underwhelming specifications or performance squarely on the head, too. How about it then, Nvidia, dare you give us your very best effort?
Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.
