NVIDIA has finally taken the covers off their long-awaited, heavily leaked lineup of RTX 30-series graphics cards through an online event. They revealed three new cards, each of which is based on their new Ampere architecture.
RTX 3090 Is The New Behemoth From NVIDIA
The RTX 3090 is their top-of-the-line graphics card. This card is replacing the RTX Titan, which is the most powerful card they currently offer. It will retail for $1,499. What will users get for that hefty price tag? 24GB of GDDR6X memory, for starters.
NVIDIA also claims that it will offer a 50% performance increase over the RTX Titan. They’re also referring to the RTX 3090 as a “Big Ferocious GPU”, or a BFGPU. Real clever.
NVIDIA Also Unveiled RTX 3080 And 3070
However, most PC gamers who are looking to upgrade their system, or make a new build, aren’t going to be able to pick that one up. For them, NVIDIA has the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070. Both of these cards are quite powerful as well.
The RTX 3080 specifically offers 19gbps speed from its 10GB GDDR6X memory. This should make gaming at 4K/60fps much more feasible. The RTX 3070 is a slight step down from that, offering 8GB of the standard GDDR6 memory.
New RTX Series Graphic Cards Offer Decent Value
That said, the pricing of both of these cards was the big surprise of the night. The RTX 3080 will retail at $699, while the RTX 3070 will cost $499. That’s still an expensive amount until you realise that both of these cards outperform the RTX 2080Ti.
The 2080Ti retailed at $1200. So, if you look at it purely from a price-to-performance perspective, both of these cards deliver excellent value. Getting more performance than the most powerful current-gen graphics card at nearly a third of the price sounds too good to be true.
We’ll have to wait and see whether NVIDIA’s claims regarding the performance of these cards hold up. However, if they can deliver performance that’s anywhere near it, now might be a great time to build a PC.
