Nvidia Launches it’s 30XX GPUs – Top 7 Key Reveals!

So, following what has felt like an exceptionally long wait from Team Green, Nvidia has now officially launched it’s 3090, 3080, and 3070 graphics cards. As you might expect, however, the event (which was held via live stream) did contain a fair bit of bloat with some of the more key aspects coming at interspersed points. – So, to save you the TLDW, let us breakdown 7 of the biggest key announcements made by Nvidia!

#1 – Nvidia Graphics Card Announcements

So, at the risk of repeating myself, Nvidia has indeed confirmed the launch of the 3090, 3080, and 3070 graphics cards. More so, that the 3090 (as I speculated around a month ago) is indeed the new Titan RTX. While we’ll get onto prices and release dates shortly, for those of you more anxious about the 3060, sadly nothing much was discussed about that GPU, but that being said, we didn’t really expect it to be mentioned here.

In something of a semi-traditional fashion, Nvidia usually kicks off it’s new GPU launches with their top-spec cards while following up with their more ‘mid-tier’ releases a month or so later.

#2 – Price & Release Dates

So, we’re kicking this one up pretty high on the list largely because we suspect that this is what about 90% of you are going to want to know. Albeit, during the actual event Nvidia spread this information around quite a lot so actually catching and compiling it into a single list wasn’t so easy. So, release dates and prices… well, here we go!

• Nvidia 3090 – $1,499 – September 24th (CONFIRMED AS THE NEW TITAN)
• Nvidia 3080 – $699 – September 17th
• Nvidia 3070 – $499 – October (Exact date TBC)

#3 – Memory & Node Design

Nvidia has confirmed that the 30XX range of graphics cards will feature an 8nm node design (somewhat contradicting the prior rumors of 7nm we heard quite frequently) as well as also coming with GDDR6X memory.

Smaller node design and super fast memory, so far so good!

#4 – Cooling Performance

One of the biggest points of interest surrounding Nvidia’s new Founders Edition design has been the utilization of a brand new cooling system. While they didn’t go into any specifics regarding how cool (or toasty) their new graphics cards will be, Nvidia did highlight that the new FE GPUs have 90W more cooling performance when compared to the 20XX Founders Edition cards.

#5 – Performance

Take this all with a grain of salt, but Nvidia suggested that, when compared to their prior generation of graphics cards, users can expect around the following levels of performance boosts:

• Nvidia 3090 – 2 times as fast as RTX 2080 Ti
• Nvidia 3080 – 2 times as fast as RTX 2080
• Nvidia 3070 – Faster than RTX 2080 Ti (exactly how much wasn’t specified)

#6 – Cuda Cores & VRAM

In terms of outright performance, Nvidia confirmed the following Cuda core counts for their new top-spec GPUs.

• Nvidia 3090 – 10,496 – Yes, that’s not a typo. Over ten thousand Cuda cores! – 24GB of VRAM
• Nvidia 3080 – 8,704 – 10GB of VRAM
• Nvidia 3070 – 5,858 – 8GB of VRAM – Twice as much as the Titan RTX and only $500!

Make no bones about it, these GPUs are going to be amazingly quick!

#7 – Huge Boosts For RTX Features

As we suspected, with the 30XX GPUs representing the 2nd-generation of RTX graphics cards, Nvidia has been keen to highlight just how much improvement users can expect from it. Such figures announced included:

• Traditional shaders – up by 270%
• Raytracing units – 1.7x faster
• Tensor cores – 2.7x faster

What Do We Think?

While we’ll reserve any final judgment over these graphics cards until we have them strapped down to our test bench, there is no other conclusion that can be made. While the 3090 might be very expensive, the level of performance clearly available from this entire range appears to be a ridiculously massive jump from that seen in the 20XX series.

Coming at $500, the 3070 seems to be the biggest no brainer in terms of outright performance with a surprisingly reasonable price tag. Hell, out of all of them, I consider it the best one to buy at the moment! If you can afford those higher spec cards though, we’re looking at a huge generational leap here and, quite frankly, despite Nvidia’s semi-tradition of all hype and no meat, these new 30XX cards really look (or at least sound) exceptionally good!

If you do, incidentally, now want to check out the Livestream, we’ve copied it in for you below. By reading up until this point, however, we’ve probably saved you the 40-minutes with all of the key (and most interesting) points!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!