NVIDIA Unveils Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs

NVIDIA has finally unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 series of GPUs during its recent virtual launch event. The company’s latest generation of GPUs, which are powered by the new Ampere architecture, include the GeForce RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070 GPUs. The virtual launch event was hosted by NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who personally unveiled the company’s new lineup of GPUs.

“Today’s launch of NVIDIA Ampere GPUs is a giant step into the future,” said Huang. “The work of thousands of engineering years, the GeForce RTX 30 Series delivers our greatest generational leap ever. NVIDIA RTX fuses programmable shading, ray tracing and AI for developers to create entirely new worlds. Twenty years from now, we’ll look back and realise that the future of gaming started here.”

According to NVIDIA, the new GPUs offer up to twice the performance and 1.9 times the power efficiency as the company’s previous Turing-based GPUs. Here are some of the key features of the new RTX 30 series that the company is calling “the greatest-ever generational leap”:

  • New streaming multiprocessors: The building block for the world’s fastest, most efficient GPU, delivering 2x the FP32 throughput of the previous generation, and 30 Shader-TFLOPS of processing power.
  • Second-gen RT Cores: New dedicated RT Cores deliver 2x the throughput of the previous generation, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute, with 58 RT-TFLOPS of processing power.
  • Third-gen Tensor Cores: New dedicated Tensor Cores, with up to 2x the throughput of the previous generation, making it faster and more efficient to run AI-powered technologies, like NVIDIA DLSS, and 238 Tensor-TFLOPS of processing power.
  • NVIDIA RTX IO: Enables rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, accelerating input/output performance by up to 100x compared with hard drives and traditional storage APIs. In conjunction with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API,(1) RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to the RTX GPU, improving frame rates and enabling nearinstantaneous game loading.
  • World’s fastest graphics memory: NVIDIA has worked with Micron to create the world’s fastest discrete graphics memory for the RTX 30 Series, GDDR6X.(2) It provides data speeds of close to 1TB/s system memory bandwidth for graphics card applications, maximising game and app performance.
  • Next-gen process technology: New 8N NVIDIA custom process from Samsung, which allows for higher transistor density and more efficiency.

The company’s new flagship GPU, the GeForce RTX 3080, features 10GB of GDDR6X memory at 19Gbps and is said to be up to twice as fast as last generation’s RTX 2080. The price of the new RTX 3080 starts at USD 699

The RTX 3080 is followed by the GeForce RTX 3070, which is said to be faster than the RTX 2080 Ti but for less than half the price and is around 60% faster than the RTX 2070. It features 8GB of GDDR6 memory with prices starting at USD 499.

Lastly, the top-end GPU of the new RTX 30 series is the GeForce RTX 3090, which the company is dubbing the “BFGPU” (Big Ferocious GPU) and the “first 8K gaming GPU.” It’s equipped with a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X memory and is said to be up to 50 percent faster than the Titan RTX. The RTX 3090 is priced at USD 1,499.

The Founders Editions of each of the new RTX 30 series GPUs feature dual-axial, flow-through thermal solutions, 12-pin power connector/s, HDMI 2.1 ports, and support for the AV1 codec.

The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs will be available in Founders Edition cards as well as from NVIDIA’s range of AIB partners such as ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac.

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