NVIDIA’s New RTX 3000 Series – Faster, Bigger, Better And More Power

It has been two years since we last saw a new gaming GPU from NVIDIA as last year’s Super GPUs were just speed bumps of the RTX 2000 series from 2018. Gamers have long awaited the arrival of NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 series, especially after seeing the countless rumors and performance expectations after the announcement of the Ampere architecture. The RTX 3000 series builds on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture announced earlier this year and inside of the A100 supercomputing and AI graphics card. NVIDIA has continually shown graphics leadership in virtually every segment and, without a doubt, in discrete gaming performance. Everyone expects AMD to mount a competitive high-end offering this year, so naturally, one would expect that NVIDIA has come to market with a competitive offering. However, NVIDIA doesn’t plan to compete on raw GPU rasterized performance alone; the company is also increasingly leaning into the RT and Tensor cores it has added to the RTX series of GPUs to differentiate from the competition. Finally, NVIDIA’s GeForce ecosystem is gaining strength and stickiness with some of these new features and applications.

The RTX 3000 Series GPUs

As launched, the RTX 3000 series consists of three GPUs, with the RTX 3080 being the focus and center of the lineup. This is consistent with NVIDIA’s past strategies with virtually every GPU the company has launched in the past decade. All three RTX 3000 series GPUs are manufactured using Samsung’s 8nm custom process node, which is how NVIDIA can build this 28 billion transistor GPU with so many cores and still fit it within a graphics card form factor. These new GPUs feature NVIDIA’s new shader cores, 2nd generation Ray Tracing cores, and 3rd generation Tensor cores, and that’s just in the chip itself. The entire RTX 3000 series will also feature NVIDIA’s new RTX IO, which integrates multiple storage technologies, including Microsoft’s new DirectStorage API. DirectStorage leverages the benefits of super-fast PCIe Gen4 NVMe storage to load game assets directly to GPU memory from the system’s SSD storage reducing load times and improving latency. The RTX 3000 series will also feature GDDR6X from Micron, which the company already confirmed earlier this month. The inclusion of this new memory translates to nearly 1GB/s of memory bandwidth on the top-end RTX 3000 series card, the RTX 3090, with 24GB of VRAM. These new GPUs also feature support for HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a, and the first discrete GPU to support the AV1 codec.

The RTX 3080 GPU, much like the RTX 2080 before it comes with three different types of cores inside of the GPU; Shader, Ray Tracing, and Tensor. NVIDIA upgraded each core in terms of performance, with the RTX 3080 having a massive 30 TFLOPS of shader performance compared to the 11 TFLOPS in the RTX 2080. This shader core improvement is almost triple the raw shading performance of the RTX 2080. The Ray Tracing cores are also being upgraded to 58 TFLOPS of Ray Tracing performance, according to NVIDIA, compared to 34 TFLOPS of performance in the RTX 2080. The 3rd generation Tensor cores are also being upgraded to 238 TFLOPS of performance from 89 TFLOPS from the RTX 2080. These represent massive performance improvements generation on generation. The RTX 3080 also sports 10GB of GDDR6X, which is 2GB more than the RTX 2080, but 1GB less than the RTX 2080 Ti. All this performance is possible with a 320W TDP, which is about 100W or almost 50% higher than the RTX 2080. So, you are paying for some of that increased performance with a more power-hungry GPU. NVIDIA says that this GPU will have a starting price of $699, which is the same MSRP as the RTX 2080 at launch, even though the RTX 2080 rarely sold for that price. We will have to wait until the RTX 3080 launches on September 17th to see real market prices.

The RTX 3090 is NVIDIA’s “BFGPU,” which NVIDIA designed to help the company retain its performance crown. The RTX 3090 is a slightly more power-hungry GPU than the RTX 3080 with a 350W TDP but also 24GB of GDDR6X instead of 10GB. The RTX 3090 is effectively an RTX 3000 series equivalent for NVIDIA’s Titan series, putting out the full-bore GPU for those that need the performance and are willing to pay for it. However, this time NVIDIA is making it more accessible and affordable at $1,499. However, this GPU really is not meant for most gamers as they’ll never fully make use of 24GB of GDDR6X or need the additional performance it affords. NVIDIA says that this is the first GPU to enable 8K 60 gaming, which makes sense because you would need 24GB to be able to handle that much resolution. The RTX 3090, according to NVIDIA, is 50% faster than the Titan RTX, which is why it commands such a premium. The RTX 3090 will be available starting September 24th, but like the RTX 3080, we will have to see where market prices settle considering Covid-19 and the run on computer components.

PRICE IN INDIA

The GeForce RTX 3000 series has three GPUs to boot, the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090. That last one, which is also Nvidia’s flagship offering, is being touted as the world’s first 8K gaming GPU. The RTX 3090 is so powerful, Nvidia is calling it Big Ferocious GPU or simply, BFGPU. It has a three-slot design with a silencer that is said to make it up to 10 times quieter than the Titan RTX. Claimed to be up to 50% faster than the Titan RTX, the RTX 3090 is also said to run up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler. The headlining feature is that it can do 8K gaming at 60fps backed by 24GB of GDDR6X memory. In India, the GeForce RTX 3090 is priced at Rs 1,52,000.

The RTX 3080, that comes with 10GB of GDDR6X memory running at 19Gbps, is said to be two times faster than the RTX 2080. It is designed for 4K 60fps gaming and will cost Rs 71,000 in India. The entry-level RTX 3070 meanwhile comes with 8GB of GDDR6X memory and is designed for playing games at 4K and 1440p resolutions. Nvidia says it is 60% faster than the RTX 2070. The big draw here is that it is theoretically faster than the RTX 2080 Ti GPU but costs less than half as much. In India, the RTX 3070 has been launched at Rs 51,000.

As is usually the case, Nvidia will be selling its own Founders Edition of the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 GPUs and partners ranging from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, to Zotac will offer their own custom take with enhancements.

The RTX 3080 will be available from September 17. The RTX 3090 will be available from September 24. The RTX 3070 will be available sometime in October.

Alongside new hardware, Nvidia is also announcing new software features to tag along. Nvidia Reflex will help reduce the latency of displays, in some cases by up to 50%, something that should come handy in competitive gaming. Nvidia Omniverse Machinima will allow creators to build real-time animations in supported games. And Nvidia Broadcast will let gamers stream games more seamlessly with AI-backed noise reduction and background blurring tools.