NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 Series Release Date, Price, Specs

Nvidia brought ray tracing to the world of gaming through their 2000 series Turing cards two years ago. Now, two years later, Nvidia revealed its new  second generation of RTX graphics cards that will run features like real-time ray tracing with much higher performance than current RTX cards. These 3000 line of Ampere-Powered GPU released earlier in September 2020 featuring the RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070 cards.

Design

The RTX 3080 Founder’s edition has a new “unibody” design with dual fan one on each side of the card in an effort to better control the flow of hot and cold air throughout the desktop. Nvidia calls its thermal solution a “dual axial flow,” and says it results in twice the cooling performance of its predecessor. The earlier review of the 3080 has pointed out that the fans only start spinning after a certain gpu temperature has reached. Quite a surprise, isn’t it? However, we are not sure if this is the same in 3070 and 3090 or not. The RTX 3090 uses this same design, only it’s much larger, as the card utilizes a triple-slot format. The RTX 3070, meanwhile, uses a more traditional dual-fan system.

The other notable feature in the design is that the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 uses a 12-pin PCIe power interface system. The company stated that the new connector combines the power of dual 8-pin connectors in a space-saving design. The RTX 3070, meanwhile, uses just a single eight-pin connector. Port selection includes three HDMI 2.1 ports and a DisplayPort 1.3a. Importantly, HDMI 2.1 supports a variable fresh rate of up to 120Hz in 4K. New OLED TVs have begun to support this new standard, which could open up more options for PC gaming in the living room.

Specs

On the September 1 event, Nvidia claimed that both their new RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 are powerful than the current RTX 2080 Ti. The following comparison was presented during their launch event.

The RTX 3080 features 8,704 CUDA cores, making for a 65% leap over the RTX 2080 Super and a 50% increase over the RTX 2080 Ti. It’s also a more power-hungry card rated at 320 watts versus the standard 250 watts of the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super. The new Ampere RTX 3080 GPU comes with 30 shader TFLOPs, up from 11; 58 ray tracing TFLOPs, up from 34; and 238 tensor TFLOPs, compared to 89.

Nvidia is also bundling in its new RTX I/O to help improve game loading times on its GPUs. The result of all this, Nvidia claims, is twice the performance of the original RTX 2080. In real-life performance, Nvidia says the RTX 3080 can consistently run games at 60 fps (frames per second) in 4K with RTX turned on, and though performance varies widely across different titles. Even ray tracing in 4K at decent frame rates is possible if you turn on DLSS.

Even bigger claims were made about the RTX 3090, which can reportedly play games in 8K at 60 fps. This is done using DLSS 2.0, of course, rather than native rendering. The RTX 3070, meanwhile, is supposedly 1.6 times faster than the RTX 2070.

Performance

The new cards are all built on the new Ampere microarchitecture, which is based on Samsung’s 8nm processor, featuring 28 billion transistors and uses second-generation RT cores and third-generation Tensor cores to boost performance.

Nvidia says performance and energy efficiency is double that of Turing, and works with DLSS 2.0 to denoise as scenes are rendered in real time with cinematic quality. Nvidia claims that the more ray tracing is done, the greater the performance.

“You can see dramatic visual quality jump of Ampere,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, noting that the RTX 3080 is twice as fast as the Turing-based RTX 2080.

In a subsequent demo uploaded to YouTube, Nvidia showcased the performance of its Ampere-based RTX 3080. The game capture showed that the GPU can handle Doom Eternal at 4K resolution and maintain approximately 100 fps performance rather smoothly.

Price

Although it was assumed that the RTX 3000 series will be more expensive that their predecessors following the previous patterns. Along with the performance, what surprised more during its reveal was its price. NVIDIA is offering better performance than their previous generation Turing cards from their Ampere cards at a less price. The RTX 3090 is a card for enthusiasts whose price in Nepal is expected to be around Rs 2,30,000 for a founder’s edition.

The RTX 3080 is the flagship that NVIDIA offers in its current Ampere cards whose price in Nepal is expected to be around Rs 1,15,000 while the more affordable RTX 3070 ‘s price in Nepal is expected to be around Rs 80,000.