NVIDIA's Unreleased TITAN ADA: 18,432 Cores and 48 GB GDDR6X in Early Tests

[AleksandarK]

Overclocking expert Roman "Der8auer" Hartung has managed to get his hands on a prototype of the NVIDIA TITAN ADA, a flagship design that never saw the light of day. Despite its absence from store shelves, the TITAN ADA prototype reveals a blend of workstation-level ambition and cutting-edge gaming power. Enthusiasts have long whispered about a true TITAN successor in the "Ada Lovelace" lineup, and now we finally have concrete evidence of what that card could have delivered. Inside this beast sits a fully enabled AD102 GPU, boasting all 144 streaming multiprocessors and delivering 18,432 CUDA cores, about 12 percent more than the retail RTX 4090. NVIDIA equipped the card with a staggering 48 GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus to match this raw compute potential, twice the capacity of any other consumer Ada GPU. The prototype uses a large quad-slot, flow-through cooler in the classic beige TITAN color to keep everything cool.

Unlike conventional layouts, the TITAN ADA's PCB is split into three sections: a rotated main board flanked by a separate daughterboard for the PCIe interface. This unusual arrangement precedes the vertical board designs that would later appear on Founders Edition cards in the RTX 50 Series. Dual 16-pin power connectors suggest NVIDIA originally aimed for a total board power well above 600 watts, yet Der8auer's tests topped out near 450 watts, likely due to the prototype's early vBIOS and older driver builds. Benchmark results confirm the card's full AD102 configuration. In synthetic graphics tests, it ran roughly 15 percent ahead of the RTX 4090, and in real-world gaming scenarios, popular titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Remnant 2 saw performance uplifts ranging from 10 to 22 percent. These figures place the TITAN ADA comfortably between the 4090 and the new RTX 5090 in both speed and efficiency.



Here are the benchmark results:

The full video follows:

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Kwadratowicz]

It's a shame that He did not disassembled the card itself ;(
But it was fun to watch, what they could do, and that throughout heat sink looks superb

 

[ncrs]

It's a shame that He did not disassembled the card itself ;(
But it was fun to watch, what they could do, and that throughout heat sink looks superb

This looks like the prototype disassembled by Gamers Nexus:

 

[Kwadratowicz]

This looks like the prototype disassembled by Gamers Nexus:

I will watch it in home, thanks a lot

 

[TheDeeGee]

They knew it needed 2 connectors to be safe due to their stupid power design, yet they went with one.

NVIDIA can suck a big one when i upgrade 5 years from now, it will be another brand.

 

[Naito]

Probably didnt release it as it would have made the 5090 even less impressive

 

[Dirt Chip]

not a TITAN, a fat bastard this GPU is.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

Probably didnt release it as it would have made the 5090 even less impressive

Or there probably wasn't any motherboard big enough to support it without costing additional parts of your anatomy.

 

[Dirt Chip]

So no 4090ti was lunched because it make 5090 look bad.
NV probebly knew this way back and dicided to keep the X090ti brend name.
4090ti woud have make the 5090 fell 'meh'

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

They knew it needed 2 connectors to be safe due to their stupid power design, yet they went with one.

NVIDIA can suck a big one when i upgrade 5 years from now, it will be another brand.

Soon enough you will be renting GPUs paying more for higher performance and all PC gaming will be in the cloud so you don't have to worry. And you simply by playing PC gaming have voted and cheered for renting a GPU in the cloud each time you play a PC game!

 

[Vayra86]

So no 4090ti was lunched because it make 5090 look bad.
NV probebly knew this way back and dicided to keep the X090ti brend name.
4090ti woud have make the 5090 fell 'meh'

Its really all bullshit, isn't it. The 5090 still feels meh. Blackwell, feels meh. Lazy, useless, overpriced, and undersupplied.

Total skip

 

[BlueBee]

This looks like the prototype disassembled by Gamers Nexus:

That card only had one high power 16 pin, the Der8auer one has 2. Possibly config 3

 

[Dirt Chip]

Its really all bullshit, isn't it. The 5090 still feels meh. Blackwell, feels meh. Lazy, useless, overpriced, and undersupplied.

Total skip

NV is doing Intel's 'tic-tok' (while Intel is in tic-tic-tic...). Blackwell is the tic.
Very soon there will only be tic's, all toc will be software AI shit exclusively.

 

[Veseleil]

This looks like the prototype disassembled by Gamers Nexus:

That was a 4090ti prototype, this is an ada titan prototype.

That card only had one high power 16 pin, the Der8auer one has 2. Possibly config 3

Did you people even watch the Derbauer's video? They are completely different in configuration, size and only similar in the PCB and cooler engineering solutions.

 

[InVasMani]

I can understand why it wasn't released with how it performs relative to the RTX 5090. The extra VRAM is nice, but not really from gaming from what it appears or not at current typical resolutions. I imagine at 8K or probably closer to 16K it would start to have advantageous in the 0.1% frames over the RTX5090, but that's a reach. I can't think of many games where it might benefit Microsoft Fight Simulator or City Skyline possibly combined with high settings and resolution and/or frame generation possibly. It's definitely more a workstation GPU and in that scenario that VRAM could be put to use in place especially for AI, but even otherwise with certain CUDA workloads that needs thrive on fast abundant computational data.