They have been teased for months but finally, they have been revealed: the Nvidia RTX 30 series of graphics cards. These new cards are powered by the Ampere architecture with a total of three GPUs releasing at launch: the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090.
Considering that the last generation’s RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 were two of the best video cards for gaming, we are excited to see what Nvidia brings to the table with this new hardware as they are promising a 2x increase in performance and power efficiency.
“Ampere is the biggest generational leap we’ve ever had,” said Huang. The new cards deliver “up to 2x the performance and 1.9x the power efficiency over previous-generation GPUs,” according to Nvidia.
The 30-series GPUs are the first on the market to support HDMI 2.1 connectivity, allowing for 8K video and even gaming.
Ampere cards are built on Samsung’s 8nm node, down from the 12nm node used for Turing (i.e. Nvidia’s 20-series GPUs), allowing for much better efficiency and transistor density.
Finally, these 3 cards are also the first to implement GDDR6X video memory, which enables memory bandwidth of up to 1TB/s.
The GeForce RTX 3070
Being considered the ‘budget’ Ampere card, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 will still cost no less than $499 at launch, which isn’t that cheap if you think about it. At this price, however, you will also get smooth 4K gaming and a card that outperforms the last-generation’s flagship, the RTX 2080Ti, which cost more than double at launch ($1200). We know that it will release sometime in October, however, the date has not been announced yet.
With 8GB of GDDR6 memory and a clock speed of 1.73GHz, the RTX 3070 is built to deliver stable performance at 1440p and 4K resolutions while still supporting ray tracing technology.
When compared to its predecessor, the RTX 2070, RTX 3070 offers a 60% increase in speed and is said to outperform even the RTX 2080Ti.
Here are some more technical details about this card:
- 5888 Nvidia CUDA cores
- 73GHz boost clock
- 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 256-bit memory interface width
The GeForce RTX 3080
This card is considered the ‘flagship’ of the Ampere series. According to Nvidia, this is the “biggest generational leap” in its history and it can be seen why. Its 10GB of GDDR6X memory and 1.71GHz boost clock will ensure buttery-smooth 4K gaming at 60fps. This GPU promises to deliver double the power of the RTX 2080, while still costing half the price.
Let’s get a little more technical; the RTX 3080 card offers:
- 8704 Nvidia CUDA cores
- 71GHz boost clock
- 10GB GDDR6X VRAM
- 320-bit memory interface width
- 30 shader TFLOPS
- 58 ray-tracing TFLOPS
- 239 Tensor-TFLOPS
And for the first time for an Nvidia flagship, all these goodies are packed into a card that will cost only $699 at launch on September 17.
The GeForce RTX 3090
The biggest and baddest GPU out of the announced trio, the RTX 3090 is called a BFGPU (big ferocious GPU) by Nvidia themselves. Scheduled to release on September 24, it will put a dent in your wallet if you decide to get it as its launch price will sit at $1499, the price of two mid-range gaming computers.
Although that number sounds ridiculous, the specs do, in fact, back it up:
- 10496 Nvidia CUDA cores
- 7GHz boost clock
- 24GB GDDR6X VRAM
- 348-bit memory interface width
All this means the RTX 3090 can run games at 8K and 60 frames per second. Even simply looking at the size of this card you can tell that it means business, the GPU takes up 3 whole slots.
