Nvidia revealed its long-awaited GeForce RTX 30-series graphics playing cards on Tuesday, and albeit, they appear ferocious. The firm claims these GPUs signify Nvidia’s “greatest generational leap ever,” and on paper, the GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3090 actually look to reside as much as these claims.
Our GeForce RTX 30-series announcement coverage and RTX 30-series vs. RTX 20-series spec comparison wade deep into the form of nitty-gritty particulars that nerds love. But when you’re a gamer who simply desires a high-level tl;dr view of what issues with these graphics playing cards, learn on.
Here are 5 issues you should find out about Nvidia’s cutting-edge GeForce RTX 30-series.
1. They ought to be smoking-fast
One of the most important digs towards the older GeForce RTX 20-series was that these GPUs didn’t present sufficient efficiency uplift versus their predecessors. Nvidia listened. The firm claims the $500 GeForce RTX 3070 shall be sooner than the previous $1,200 GeForce RTX 2080 Ti flagship, and the $700 GeForce RTX 3080 will churn out frames at a a lot increased clip. As for the monstrous $1,400 GeForce RTX 3090, properly, Nvidia didn’t get into many exhausting efficiency particulars aside from to say it will likely be the primary graphics card able to enjoying video games at 8K decision. Holy moley.
Check out these Nvidia-supplied efficiency charts:
An Nvidia-supplied comparability of how the GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs examine towards the RTX 20-series in quite a lot of video games.
And sure, the GeForce RTX 30-series ought to completely scream in video games with RTX options like ray tracing and DLSS enabled. Nvidia says the revamped RT and tensor cores inside these “Ampere”-architecture GPUs shall be 1.7X and a couple of.7X sooner than their predecessors, respectively.
Of course, you need to watch for impartial testing to confirm Nvidia’s lofty claims, however however: Giddy up.
2. The reminiscence could make your video games sooner
The GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 pack cutting-edge GDDR6X reminiscence, which guarantees to maneuver information twice as quick because the GDDR6 reminiscence discovered within the GeForce RTX 20-series. The 3090 comes full of a whopping 24GB of it. That’s impressively ludicrous, however some new Nvidia expertise goals to place that reminiscence and the GeForce RTX 30-series’ PCIe 4.0 help to even higher use: enhancing your game-loading occasions.
CEO Jensen Huang didn’t go into a lot element, however Nvidia’s RTX IO expertise places the pace of PCIe 4.0 storage to extra environment friendly use, sending some loading and texture information over the PCIe 4.0 connection of the GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs to faucet into their blazing-fast onboard memory–rather than routing all that info by the CPU first, the place issues may get slowed down. Games may load nearly instantaneously, Huang teased. Nvidia claims the expertise provides 100X larger throughput with 20X decrease CPU utilization than conventional strategies.
Many questions stay—together with whether or not it’ll simply work, or if sport builders might want to actively help it—however it’s reassuring to listen to that RTX IO is constructed upon Microsoft’s DirectStorage API for Windows. You understand how Microsoft and Sony hold speaking up how briskly the storage is of their next-gen consoles? DirectStorage underpins the speedy Velocity Architecture storage system within the Xbox Series X, too.
3. New cooler, new 12-pin, new energy provide?
Generating all these frames isn’t free. The GeForce RTX 3080 attracts 320W of energy—much more than the previous-gen GeForce RTX 2080 Ti flagship, which sucked down 260W. And that beastly GeForce RTX 3090 is even hungrier, wolfing down 350W. Oof. You would possibly want a brand new energy provide to deal with these graphics playing cards, although Nvidia says a 750W PSU ought to work simply positive. Maybe don’t pair it with an overclocked Core i9-10900Ok, although.
How the brand new cooler works.
Nvidia wanted to re-engineer its entire design to make this work. The GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 use a tiny new 12-pin connector that mixes the ability of twin 8-pin connectors right into a single slot, in order that they’ll match on a brand new ultra-compact PCB contained in the playing cards, which was wanted to create a brand new cooling system with impartial push/pull followers that faucet your system’s rear case followers for added thermal assist. Phew.
Even with all that, Nvidia’s Founders Edition playing cards come rated for 93-degree Celsius working temperatures, increased than the 89-degree most set by the older RTX 20-series GPUs. All that mentioned, Huang mentioned the brand new cooler on the GeForce RTX 3080 operates a full 30 levels cooler than the prior-gen RTX Titan. Good stuff.
4. Adios, SLI
Multi-GPU configurations haven’t actually been compelling (or very operational) for a number of graphics card generations now, because of a mix of more and more highly effective GPUs and more and more wonky sport engine help. The GeForce GTX 10-series reduced SLI support to two graphics cards, down from 4 prior. The GeForce RTX 30-series all however eliminates it.
GeForce RTX 3090: The extra you purchase, the extra SLI you save.
The $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 “BFGPU” is the one card with an NVLink connector for SLI. Even the GeForce RTX 3080 that Nvidia known as the 30-series flagship lacks it. It’s no large loss to most individuals, particularly since these GPUs look prepared to utterly chew by frames at 1440p and 4K resolutions, however pour one out, price-is-no-object monster rig lovers—except you need to dump $3,000 right into a twin 3090 rig for even higher 8K gaming efficiency on a monster TV.
5. More than simply {hardware}
Nvidia’s supporting the GeForce RTX 30-series launch with extra than simply the playing cards themselves.
While the RTX 20-series infamously launched without any ray traced games in tow, Nvidia’s RTX push for ray traced and DLSS video games has been gaining steam for two years now. The firm landed a titan for this launch: Fortnite is getting ray-traced shadows and DLSS. With Minecraft rolling out ray tracing and DLSS earlier this 12 months to superb impact, the 2 hottest PC video games on this planet are firmly onboard the RTX bandwagon now.
That’s not all. Nvidia’s rolling out two new items of software program that can assist you put the ability of those new GPUs to larger use.
Nvidia Reflex is “a revolutionary suite of GPU, G-SYNC display, and software technologies that measure and reduce system latency in competitive games.” We’ll want to check it ourselves earlier than ingesting the Kool-Aid, in fact, however Nvidia claims it may well cut back click-to-display latency by as much as 33 p.c, or perhaps a whopping 50 p.c, which may provide you with a considerable edge over the competitors in esports video games the place each millisecond issues.
Call of Duty Warzone, Valorant, Fortnite, and Destiny 2 shall be among the many first video games to help Nvidia Reflex when it launches this month. It’ll even be coming to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and Apex: Legends.
Finally, when you’re into streaming, you’ll need to take a look at the Nvidia Broadcast suite additionally rolling out this month. It faucets into the AI tensor cores inside RTX GPUs so as to add some skilled polish to your streams. The suite contains the magical RTX Video noise-cancellation feature, together with adjustable background blur, greenscreen-style background substitute, and automated head-tracking results in your video feed. They seemed fairly darn spectacular within the demo.
Looking for much more data? Check out our GeForce RTX 30-series announcement coverage and RTX 30-series vs. RTX 20-series spec comparison to wade deep into speak about transistor course of nodes, HDMI 2.1 help, and extra.