In what is clearly one of NVIDIA’s worst-kept secret, its GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card are now live and officially here. As per initial reports, the GPU brand has launched a total of graphics cards, all of which are powered by its new Ampere GPU architecture.
To further state the obvious, the three cards are the GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. Starting the RTX 3090, the card is the heaving Goliath of the three, even despite the order of introduction by Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. Mind you, that’s just the physical aspect of it, and it is – in the words of Twitter user Shen Ye (@shen) – a “Chonky Boy”.
Again, as earlier rumours suggested, the RTX 3090 feature 24GB of the new GDDR6X graphics memory, running at a speed of at least 19Gbps. And while Huang did not specify it, it has seemingly been confirmed that the card will operate on a 384-bit memory bus. Other performance details include 36 Shader-TFLOPS, 69 RT-FLOPS, and 285 Tensor-TFLOPS. Oh, and it’s also capable of running games at 8K resolutions and at 60 fps, to boot.
There’s also the GeForce RTX 3080 that Huang managed to hide from us in plain sight until the moment of revelation. In terms of specs, the RTX 3080 is set to ship out with 10GB GDDR6X graphics memory; while that may not seem like much when compared to what NVIDIA’s Turing-generation graphics card had, Huang made it exceedingly clear in his presentation.
The card alone has the power of two RTX 2080 running in SLI. Additional performance metrics of the RTX 3080 include 30 Shader-TFLOPs, 58 RT-FLOPS, and 238 Tensor-TFLOPs.
Last but not least on the list is the GeForce RTX 3070. Unlike the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, the RTX 3070 doesn’t actually use the new GDRR6X memory, but the older GDDR6 memory format. But, given that its 8GB graphics memory is built around Ampere, Huang says that the card is more powerful and power-efficient than NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line Turing-based graphics card, the RTX 2080 Ti.
Regardless of the graphics card model, all three RTX 30 series cards are based on Samsung’s 8nm die lithography and are cooled via NVIDIA’s new and unique “Dual Axial Flow Through” cooling solution. That envelops the cards’ equally impressive ultra compact PCB design and its 18 phases of power.
What in the name of Lord Gaben is this pic.twitter.com/o8HHklTeJt
— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) September 1, 2020
— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) September 1, 2020
Naturally, no sooner had Huang made the existence of the NVIDIA cards official, image renders of the cards sporting some pretty interesting and radical custom-cooling solutions began to mushroom online. Above are just some of the render, courtesy of Videocardz.
Pricing for the NVIDIA’s Founders Edition cards starts at US$499 (~RM2067) for the GeForce RTX 3070, US$699 (~RM2895) for the RTX 3080, and a whopping US$1499 (~RM6209). As for when the cards will be available, both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are slated to go on sale on 17 September and 24 September, respectively. While the RTX 3070 will hit store shelves sometime in October.
