Now that the hype is dying down, some of the shine is starting to rub off of Nvidia's new RTX 3000 generation. Although the RTX 3080 is an amazingly fast card, some have pointed out how quickly its 10GB of VRAM is likely to be saturated in upcoming AAA games — it's 1GB less than the RTX 2080 Ti had afterall, even if the 3080 is 30 percent faster.
With that in mind, many are awaiting the performance numbers of the monstrously big and power hungry RTX 3090, but early reports (via Videocardz) suggest that in games, it might be only 10 percent faster than the 3080, despite being nearly double the price.
The RTX 3090 has the same GPU core as the 3080, but with 20 percent more CUDA cores, and more than twice the GDDR6X memory (24GB). While early performance numbers do peg it as being exceedingly powerful, in some cases well over 50 percent faster than a 2080 Ti, it's only around 10 percent faster in games than the 3080 and that's best case scenario. In others, especially with RTX turned on, it's closer to five percent.
As much as that's still a big uplift over last-generation cards, it's a big ask for gamers or anyone to spend more than twice what the 3080 costs for a mere 10 percent extra real-world performance.
The 3090 is more of a Titan-replacement than a 2080 Ti replacement, meaning it's targeted more towards workstations, but considering the 3080 might be hamstrung at 4K (its best resolution, by far), the 3090 was hoped to be the big gaming saviour that blows it out of the water. And it just isn't going to do that. What's more, AMD's RDNA 2 cards could have 16GB at the 3080 performance(ish) level.
If so, AMD could be about to make Nvidia look very silly. Just wait for late October and we'll know a whole lot more.
