It's often surprising to me how different engineering samples can be from the end product that reaches the shelves. As a case in point, redditor reports they've come into possession of an early engineering sample of the , and it looks to be of a significantly higher spec than the release card.
One Founders Edition BIOS and a modified Nvidia driver later, and Substantial-Mark-959 says they've been able to get the card up and running. The GPU-Z readout makes for some interesting reading, showing 4480 shaders, 96 ROPs, and 280 TMUs—oh, and 12 GB of VRAM, a whole gigabyte more than the released card.
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For reference, the has 4352 shaders, 88 ROPs, and 272 TMUs. That'd make this particular sample slightly quicker in theory, especially as it has a 384 bit bus width compared to the standard card's 352-bit version.
With the cooler removed, the chip itself looks a lot like the stock TU102 die—although as another eagle-eyed redditor has noticed, it doesn't have any markings showing the model designation.
So, why did we end up with a less-powerfully-specced variant in the end, then? Well, I'll have to go into full on speculation mode here, but there are multiple reasons why the RTX 2080 Ti could have ended up being neutered down from the version you see here.
For a start, chip yields can be a relatively unknown quantity during the early engineering phase, so it's possible that it missed the sweet spot for maximum chip utilisation potential once Nvidia knew what sort of yields it was dealing with. It's also possible this configuration ended up giving the Nvidia engineers headaches when it came to cooling, or potentially caused unforeseen issues with other parts of the component chain, like the GDDR6 modules.
Or, simply put, it could have cost significantly more to make once all the other factors in its production were added in. Or it could even be a later prototype making use of leftover dies, to see whether it'd be worth Nvidia releasing a Super Ti Special Boi Mega Edition card to use up available stock. Ifs, buts, and maybes. The truth is, we'll likely never know,
Nonetheless, creating a viable product with something as complicated as a GPU is a balancing act of many, many factors, and whatever blend we're looking at here simply didn't meet the criteria Nvidia was looking for. It's a super-interesting look at a graphics card that could have been, whatever its reason for existing, and an undoubtedly cool find.
The GPU itself appears to be performing roughly as expected for the most part, although Substantial-Mark-959 has found the odd issue with power, as the card currently refuses to wake from sleep—and their test PC no longer powers down correctly with the GPU installed. Still, it's apparently been running 3DMark's Port Royal Extreme benchmark without issue, and even a bit of .
For a card that otherwise seems destined to have reached the scrap bin, I'd say that was pretty good going. Keep trucking, old soldier. Your time in the sun has eventually arrived.
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