NVIDIA just unveiled the first next-generation RTX ‘Ampere’ graphics cards: RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070.
| Card | TFLOPS | VRAM | Price |
| RTX 3090 | 36 | 24 GB GDDR6X | $1499 |
| RTX 3080 | 30 | 10GB GDDR6X | $699 |
| RTX 3070 | 20 | 8GB GDDR6 | $499 |
RTX 3080 is $699 and will release September 17. RTX 2070 is $499 and will release in October.
RTX 3090 represents a new naming scheme for the usual NVIDIA ‘Titan’ tier. It’s priced significantly higher than the other cards, at an eye-watering $1499, and will ship September 24.
RTX Ampere
Ampere is NVIDIA’s new GPU architecture, replacing ‘Turing’ which powered last generation cards (like RTX 2080).
NVIDIA says the new GPU cores, which it calls Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), deliver double the performance compared to Turing’s, with 1.9x the performance per watt.
The first generation RTX cards introduced hardware-accelerated raytracing, enabled by RT Cores. NVIDIA says Ampere’s new RT cores increase ray tracing performance by “up to 2x”.
Whereas Turing used GDDR6 VRAM, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 use the new GDDR6X. This should deliver roughly 50% improved video memory bandwidth. RTX 2070 is still listed as using GDDR6.
A ‘Generational Leap’?
According to NVIDIA, the Ampere’s architecture enables a true generational leap in performance. During the launch event, CEO Jensen Huang claimed even the $499 RTX 3070 is more powerful than last gen’s 2080 Ti (which launched at $999).
This kind of improvement hasn’t been seen in PC-based GPUs for decades. If true, it should drive the PC platform into a new realm of graphical capabilities, far beyond even the impressive next-generation consoles.
We haven’t seen any real world benchmarks yet though, so for now we just have NVIDIA’s word.
Will you be getting an RTX 3-series GPU? Or are you waiting for a response from AMD first? Let us know in the comments below!
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