The GeForce Special Event stream has come to an end and now, we have official details on the RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070. All three GPUs are built on NVIDIA's new Ampere architecture and include 2nd generation RT Cores and 3rd generation Tensor Cores, combining for massive performance boosts.
|
GeForce RTX 3090 |
GeForce RTX 3080 |
GeForce RTX 3070 |
CUDA Cores |
10,496 |
8,704 |
5,888 |
VRAM |
24 GB GDDR6X |
10 GB GDDR6X |
8 GB GDDR6 |
Prices Starting At |
$1499 |
$699 |
$499 |
Release Date |
September 24 |
September 17 |
Available October |
The RTX 30-series cards usher in a wealth of changes, most notably how powerful these cards will be compared to the soon-to-be previous generation. The RTX 3090 will have an ungodly 24 GB of memory, take up three slots in your case and hopefully not sound like a jet engine when at full throttle. It includes a "silencer" which is a "three-slot, dual-axial, flow-through design." Bring your 1000W PSU or higher, especially if you want to pair this sucker with an Intel Core i9-10900K. You're going to need it.
The RTX 3080 will use 10 GB of GDDR6X memory with 760 Gbps bandwidth and is claimed to be twice as fast as the RTX 2080. The RTX 3070 card will have 8 GB of memory and is supposedly 60% faster than the RTX 2070. For comparison, the RTX 2080 Ti has 11 GB of memory and 616 Gbps of bandwidth. Both are geared towards owners of Nvidia's superb 10-series of GPUs which were so good their users have been reluctant to upgrade. The RTX 3080 is expected to handler 4K at over 60 frames per second, while the RTX 3070 should handle 1440p super smoothly.
There's a big bump in performance, so big that Nvidia claims the RTX 3090 will handle 8K gaming at 60 frames per second - the 20-series struggled with 4K at 60! This thing will likely play any ray tracing enabled game at 4K with a frame rate that could make angels cry. The RTX 3090 also pulls ahead of the Titan RTX in most specs (both cards have the same amount of memory), making this GPU the future must-have for extreme PC builds. The best of the best.
RTX 30-series cards will also be based on 7nm architecture, matching AMD's current generation of graphics cards. At the moment, Nvidia has a serious upper hand over AMD, and if AMD is going to compete, it has to not only make ray tracing look as good as GeForce cards, but it has to hit the same frame rate benchmarks, something that it wasn't necessarily able to do with its RX 5000-series.
Nvidia's new cards will start at an MSRP of £1,400, £650, and £470, respectively. Shockingly cheap given the major leap in performance Nvidia claims. The £1,400 RTX 3090 is expected to ship 24 September, the £650 RTX 3080 is expected to ship 17 September, and the £470 RTX 3070 is expected to ship in October. t will be interesting to see how the RTX 3080 and RTX 2080 Ti compare in particular, considering they are nearly identical in specs. How much of an advantage will the new Ampere architecture actually have over the Turing? A smaller transistor size in the newer generation will theoretically mean faster speeds, since the transistors are closer together, which but how much faster will it be (Nvidia claims twice as fast in some instances). I personally can't wait to get my hands on the new cards to see.