If you've been holding off on buying a new graphics card, you'll soon have good reason to pull your wallet out. Nvidia's incoming RTX 3000 series GPUs are an enormous performance improvement over their RTX-2000 predecessors, with even mid-range option, the RTX 3070, offering performance in excess of the last-generation kingpin, the 2080 Ti, with advanced ray tracing and Tensor cores for second-generation DLSS. 4K is now within reach of more modest GPU budgets than ever before.
The RTX 3070 will have 5,888 CUDA cores, a boost clock of 1.725GHz, 8GB of GDDR6 memory at 14Gbps, and a power draw of 220w. With a shader performance of over 20 TFLOPs, it offers performance that easily outstrips the 2080 Ti for just $500. It will go on sale in October.
The next-tier up, the 3080, will go on sale on September 17 and have 8,704 CUDA cores, and a boost clock of 1.71GHz. It will have 10GB of GDDR6X memory running at 19Gbps and a TDP of 320w. Its launch price will be $700 for the Founders Edition, though third-party alternatives may be lower or higher. Early tests suggest it could be between 60 and 80 percent faster than the 2080.
The monstrous flagship of this generation is the RTX 3090, a GPU so powerful we can't quite believe it exists. It offers 10,496 CUDA cores and a boost clock just under 1.7GHz. It will have 24GB of GDDR6 memory running at 19.5Gbps and demand 350W of power. At $1,500 it's far from cheap, but it's the most powerful GPU we've ever seen and appears, with the help of DLSS, to deliver not only 100+ FPS at 4K resolution, but even 60 FPS at 8K with ray tracing enabled. It goes on sale on September 24.
Nvidia has knocked it out of the park with these GPUs. Now we need to wait to see how AMD responds later this month.
