Working prototype of Nvidia's Titan Ada comes close to RTX 5090
A Titan version of Nvidia's 4000 series cards never appeared. A prototype that has now been tested shows why.
Nvidia's monster GPU with monster cooler and two 12VHPWR connections in the test.
(Image: Roman "der8auer" Hartung / Youtube)
The German YouTuber and hardware developer Roman "der8auer" Hartung has managed to obtain an Nvidia graphics card of the type "Titan Ada". It is a different model to the samples of a suspected GeForce RTX 4090 Ti previously shown by other media, which, like the Titan, never came onto the market. The card does not look like a real prototype in terms of appearance and features, but rather like a small series. From its own cooler design to the illuminated Titan lettering, everything that makes up a production model from Nvidia's Founders Editions is present.
As with the supposed GeForce RTX 4090 Ti, which Gamers Nexus, among others, disassembled and tested at the beginning of 2025, the Titan Ada is also constructed differently to most graphics cards. The board is not mounted parallel to the cooler, but parallel to the motherboard. In other words, it sits at the bottom of the graphics card. This helps the airflow in the cooler because the PCB is not in the way. Unlike the 3-slot designs of the Founders Edition of the GeForce RTX 4090, however, the heat sink of the Titan Ada is four slots thick, which is also due to the space for the narrow PCB.
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AD102-450 in full configuration
On the Titan Ada, Nvidia's AD102-450 GPU operates in full configuration, meaning that no functional units are deactivated. The fastest Ada-Lovelace card for gaming, RTX 4090, is equipped with the AD102-300. This offers 16,384 computing units (shaders), while the GPU on the Titan has 18,432, which is always 12 percent more for other units such as raster output stages (ROPs) and ray tracing cores. The current RTX 5090 offers 21,760 shaders, which is another 18 percent more than the Titan Ada. As usual for this series, the Titan is well ahead of the other series in terms of memory: 48 GB of GDDR6X are soldered compared to the 32 GB of the RTX 5090. However, because the Titan model uses slower GDDR6X memory instead of the new GDDR7, the RAM is still potentially a bottleneck.
| Unreleased Titan Ada compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 and 5090 | |||
| GeForce | Titan Ada | RTX 4090 | RTX 5090 |
| Graphics chip | AD102-450 | AD102-300 | GB202-300 |
| Shader / ray tracing / tensor cores | 18.432 / 144 / 576 | 16.384 / 128 / 512 | 21.760 / 170 / 680 |
| Base clock / Boost | 2235 / 2520 MHz | 2235 / 2520 MHz | 2010 / 2410 MHz |
| FP32 computing performance | 92,9 TFlops | 82,6 TFlops | 104,9 TFlops |
| Memory | 48 GB GDDR6X | 24 GB GDDR6X | 32 GB GDDR7 |
| Memory throughput | 1008 GB/s, 384 Bit | 1008 GB/s, 384 Bit | 1792 GB/s, 512 Bit |
| PCI Express | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 x16 | 5.0 x16 |
| Power consumption | ~450 Watt | 450 Watt | 575 Watt |
| Power supply | 2 Ă— 12V-2x6 | 12V-2x6 | 12V-2x6 |
As the Titan Ada never went on sale and has apparently not been maintained for years, Hartung had to test it with a driver from 2023. This means that some current games do not run at all, others with restrictions, as he describes in his video. However, measurements with the synthetic 3DMark and some games that are not as fresh as dew, such as Cyberpunk 2077, were still possible. The Titan achieved 139 fps in the first GT1 test of 3DMark Timespy Extreme. This makes it 15 percent faster than an RTX 4090. The RTX 5090 – with the latest driver – is only 11 percent faster. In the more modern 3DMark Speedway, however, the 5090 is 33 percent faster than the Titan (presumably without driver optimizations).
Exactly between RTX 4090 and 5090
With Cyberpunk 2077, the Titan is 22 percent faster than the RTX 4090, but the RTX 5090 is another 26 percent faster than the Titan. However, the driver of the constantly optimized game probably makes a difference here. Nevertheless, Roman Hartung comes to an understandable conclusion: Nvidia probably didn't launch the Titan Ada on the market to make the gap to the next Blackwell generation with the RTX 5090 look bigger. In purely technical terms, more would have been possible with Ada-Lovelace GPUs.
This applies in particular to the power consumption: instead of the TDP of 575 watts for the 5090, the Titan Ada only draws less than 450 watts from its two 12V 2x6 sockets in the tests. This makes it the most efficient of the three cards tested. How Nvidia has wired the two connectors – with one socket on the RTX 5090 has not yet been clarified – . Hartung has not yet disassembled the rare graphics card, but will do so in a later video.
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