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Nvidia has officially revealed its new GeForce RTX 30xx series of video cards today. Specifically, they unveiled the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 graphics cards as part of a special online reveal event. CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, donned his iconic jacket from the comfort of his kitchen in order to make today's reveal.
These cards are coming roughly two years after the release of their 20xx series of cards. The 20xx series was the first to support real-time ray tracing and these 30xx cards are now the second generation to do so. The 30xx series are the first consumer GPUs that will feature the company's new Ampere design. The 20xx series are on the Turing architecture.
The pricing on the cards seems to be far more reasonable when compared to the 20xx launch lineup. Nvidia's "flagship" card, the RTX 3080 will start at $699 (USD). It is said to deliver twice the performance of the RTX 2080 Super at the same price. It features 10GB of GDDR6X VRAM. This one releases on September 17, 2020.
The RTX 3070 will be released in October. It features 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and will be made available at a price point of $499. This card is supposedly faster than an RTX 2080 Ti, which retailed for at least $1,199. It will be roughly 60% faster than the RTX 2070 and is designed for 4K gaming.
And then there is the absolute unit of a card: The RTX 3090. Nvidia is calling this one a "BFGPU" and is said to be the world's first 8K gaming GPU. They showed this behemoth of a card off by playing games like Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood at 8K resolution at 60FPS. The RTX 3090 is said to be 50% faster than the Titan RTX, will feature 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM, and will be available on September 24 for a mere $1,499.
Keep in mind that all of these prices are the base MSRP and will likely creep upwards as they tend to do with video cards. A nice comparison of the various generations can be found at Nvidia's website.
Nvidia's new cards, specifically the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 utilize a new cooling solution.
For our new GeForce RTX 30 Series, we’ve created an innovative dual axial flow through cooling solution, featuring two fans - one at the left front, and another on the right rear that draws air through the card (the GeForce RTX 3070 flow through design differs slightly, with its fans both mounted on the top of the card).
As heat is drawn away from components into the hybrid vapor chamber, it is efficiently distributed across the length of the card and throughout the massive aluminum fin stack. The left fan pushes air heated by the fin stack out through extra-large GPU bracket vents, while the right fan draws the air towards the top chassis exhaust.
As heat is drawn away from components into the hybrid vapor chamber, it is efficiently distributed across the length of the card and throughout the massive aluminum fin stack. The left fan pushes air heated by the fin stack out through extra-large GPU bracket vents, while the right fan draws the air towards the top chassis exhaust.
At present, we have not year heard about what AMD's plans are for their new video cards. We expect that we will see something coming out of Team Red soon because of some of their new technologies will be used in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Both of these systems promise real-time ray tracing support, which is not actually available in any of AMD's consumer cards yet.
In related news, Nvidia and Epic just announced that RTX is coming to Fortnite. This includes real-time ray tracing effects and DLSS.
