Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tonight announced the new generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards from his kitchen in the form of the RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070. Nvidia itself calls the new RTX 30 cards the biggest breakthrough in PC gaming since 1999, the year in which the first GeForce card appeared on the market.
The three newly announced graphics cards form the second generation RTX cards, Nvidia’s name for cards with hardware ray tracing support that enable realistic lighting in games. More and more games support ray tracing and during the presentation Nvidia announced that Fortnite will also get RTX support.
Ampere architecture
The cards are based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, which is produced on a Samsung 8n process. Improvements compared to the previous generation are in better ray tracing and better AI acceleration (for sharper images, among other things). The differences between the three announced cards are in the number of Cuda cores (the computing units), clock speeds, memory bandwidth and the amount of memory. Top model RTX 3090 has 10496 Cuda cores and a whopping 24 GB GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 8704 Cuda cores and 10 GB GDDR6X while the RTX 3070 connects 5888 Cuda cores with 8 GB GDDR6.
Twice as fast
According to Nvidia, the new architecture offers 1.9 times the power per watt. According to Nvidia, the RTX 3080 is twice as powerful as the RTX2080 while the RTX 3070 is faster than the RTX 2080Ti. The RTX 3090 is the first card suitable for 8K gaming, according to Nvidia. Whether the GeForce RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070 really perform as well as Nvidia promises, you will soon read in our review.
Prices and availability
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 will hit the market in October for $ 499.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 will be released on September 17 for $ 699.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 will be released on September 24 for $ 1,499.
Prices in euros and availability of custom variants from other manufacturers are expected shortly.
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