Nvidia unveiled its RTX 30-series graphics playing cards Tuesday, two lengthy years after the GeForce RTX 20-series kicked off ray tracing in earnest. The wait was worthwhile: The 30-series appears to be like monstrous, spearheaded by a completely loaded, 8K-ready $1,400 GeForce RTX 3090 “BFGPU” that revives the dormant xx90-class model beforehand reserved for dual-chip beasts. The $700 GeForce RTX 3080 and $500 GeForce RTX 3070 had been additionally introduced. All of them will embrace a radical new RTX IO know-how designed to rival the ultra-fast storage applied sciences coming to the next-gen consoles.
CEO Jensen Huang calls this the “greatest generational leap ever” for Nvidia’s GeForce playing cards. Hot rattling.
Oh, and ray tracing is coming to Fortnite. And new Nvidia Reflex software program will make you way more lethal in esports video games. And Nvidia Broadcast will use the AI tensor cores inside these new GPUs to spruce up the audios and visuals of your sport streams in actual time.
Phew. Let’s dig in.
The GeForce RTX 3090
GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070 specs and options
The GeForce RTX 3090 is so filled with new know-how that Nvidia wanted to create a new 12-pin power connector and a radically overhauled cooling system simply to suit all of it in. The GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 aren’t fairly as ludicrous, however they nonetheless look poised to outpace their predecessors in each conventional and ray traced video games—quelling a key criticism of the older RTX 20-series GPUs, which targeted extra on introducing ray tracing than advancing pure gaming efficiency.
Bottom line: These suckers will likely be quick.
Let’s check out the sunshine, high-level specs that Nvidia revealed earlier than diving into the nitty-gritty. Take the efficiency comparisons with the caveat that they probably cite best-case efficiency eventualities with ray tracing and DLSS enabled, relatively than simply conventional gaming body charges.
GeForce RTX 3090 specs:
- 8K 60-fps gameplay with DLSS
- 24GB GDDR6X reminiscence
- 3-slot twin axle through-flow design
- 30 levels cooler than RTX Titan design
- 36 shader teraflops
- 285 tensor TFLOPS
- $1,499
- Launching September 24
GeForce RTX 3080 specs:
- 2X efficiency of RTX 2080
- 10GB GDDR6X reminiscence
- 30 shader TFLOPS
- 58 ray tracing TFLOPS
- 238 tensor TFLOPS
- $700
- Launching September 17
GeForce RTX 3070 specs:
- Faster than RTX 2080 Ti
- 8GB GDDR6 (not GDDR6X)
- 20 shader TFLOPS
- 40 RT TFLOPS
- 163 tensor TFLOPS
- $500
- Launching October
On to the nitty-gritty:
The GeForce RTX 30-series builds on the inspiration set by its predecessors, with extra superior RT cores and third-generation tensor cores inside its new-look “Ampere” GPU structure. All these extra cores ought to enhance ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling efficiency, respectively.
Nvidia’s new chips additionally make the bounce to 8nm course of know-how, transferring up from the 12nm process used in the RTX 20-series “Turing” GPUs, which itself was an optimized iteration of the 16nm course of used within the GTX 10-series. This is the primary main course of node leap shortly, and it ought to present an enormous enhance in conventional gaming efficiency. The final time Nvidia moved up a node, the GTX 10-series blew away its predecessors. Leaping to the 8nm course of gave AMD’s rival Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards an enormous enhance in each efficiency and energy effectivity.
Nvidia says its new Ampere GPUs provide twice the vitality effectivity of Turing, with shader cores which can be 2.7X sooner than those contained in the GeForce RTX 20-series. The revamped RT and tensor cores will likely be 1.7X and a pair of.7X sooner than their predecessors, respectively, which ought to assist ship big efficiency positive aspects in video games with ray tracing and/or DLSS 2.0 enabled, as proven within the chart under.
Nvidia didn’t give any concrete numbers for conventional gaming efficiency, however the firm says the GeForce RTX 3070 will spit out frames sooner than the earlier RTX 2080 Ti flagship at 4K in “average performance across multiple popular graphics intensive games,” whereas the GeForce RTX 3080 will likely be considerably sooner. It’s unknown whether or not this comparability consists of video games with ray tracing and DLSS enabled, however we’d guess so. The RTX 3090, in the meantime, was billed because the world’s first 8K graphics card with DLSS enabled, so it’s positive to be a monster.
The GeForce RTX 30-series’ secret sauce isn’t restricted to GPU enhancements alone. The GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 will embrace cutting-edge GDDR6X reminiscence. Nvidia co-developed it with Micron, and Nividia’s Huang claims it may possibly transmits twice as a lot information as conventional GDDR6 reminiscence in the identical period of time. (The GeForce RTX 3070 nonetheless makes use of GDDR6.) The GeForce RTX 3090 packs a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X, whereas the RTX 3080 consists of 10GB. Nvidia plans to place all these gigs to a newfound use: Improving sport loading instances.
Nvidia’s new RTX IO know-how places the pace of PCIe 4.0 storage to extra environment friendly use, routing some loading information over the PCIe 4.0 connection of the GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs to faucet into their blazing-fast onboard reminiscence, relatively than routing all that info by means of the CPU first. Huang didn’t go into a lot element, however claims the know-how will provide 100X sooner throughput and 20X decrease CPU utilization than conventional strategies. If true, these speeds will little doubt turn out to be useful, particularly once you’re loading worlds utilizing large 4K or 8K textures.
Whether builders might want to help RTX IO explicitly stays to be seen, however the know-how leverages the Microsoft DirectStorage API for Windows—the identical know-how underpinning the Xbox Series X’s ultra-fast Velocity Architecture. Fingers crossed this will likely be as superior because it appears; if that’s the case, it may very well be simply as a lot of a sport changer for enthusiast-class PC avid gamers as ray tracing itself is.
How the brand new cooler works.
All three of the graphics playing cards embrace an “ultra-compact” PCB with 18 phases of energy, together with Nvidia’s redesigned cooling resolution. The new cooler nonetheless packs twin followers, however in unbiased push/pull configurations with totally different goals. The one nearer to the rear of the system sucks in air and blows it out of your graphics card’s I/O bracket, following conventional strategies. The one in entrance leverages the shorter PCB to consumption air after which expel it proper again out of the highest of the graphics card, letting your case’s rear fan outtake deal with extra of the thermal load.
Nvidia didn’t particular energy necessities for these playing cards. Given all of the engineering efforts required to invent this cooler, they should be hefty.
Nvidia Reflex and Nvidia Broadcast
The new graphics playing cards are bolstered by a number of gameplay-enhancing software program enhancements.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicked off the occasion by saying that real-time ray tracing and DLSS 2.0 are coming to Fortnite. Those applied sciences debuted in Minecraft earlier this yr to startling impact, so now Nvidia has the 2 most-played video games on the earth on the RTX bandwagon.
But appears to be like aren’t all the pieces. In the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it world of esports, each body issues. A delay of even just a few milliseconds can imply the distinction between demise and victory. To make it easier to in your battles, the newly revealed Nvidia Reflex software program optimizes the rendering pipeline in video games to enhance latency by as much as a whopping 50 p.c. If it really works as promised, this might provide you with a large benefit versus your competitors. Call of Duty Warzone, Valorant, Fortnite, and Destiny 2 will likely be among the many first video games to help Nvidia Reflex when it launches this month.
Finally, this streaming factor isn’t going away, and Nvidia Broadcast brings the ability of the GeForce RTX 30-series GPU’s superior tensor cores to bear on real-time audio and video processing. The software program works on any RTX graphics card—not simply these new ones—and consists of the magical RTX Voice noise-cancellation feature, together with adjustable background blur, greenscreen-style background substitute, and computerized head-tracking results to your video feed. Even the greenest Twitch streamers can get a professional-seeming setup up and operating rapidly with that toolkit. Nvidia Broadcast can also be launching in September.