The Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 follows in the footsteps of the RTX 2080, a card that brought ray tracing to consumer graphics for the first time. And, while that implementation has been a mixed bag – to say the least – this upcoming generation looks like it is going a long way towards cementing the technology in mainstream gaming, alongside the next-generation game consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X, which will also use the tech.
As such, there is tremendous pressure on Nvidia to deliver an increase to performance when it comes to ray tracing, but also to traditional rasterization performance. Luckily, Nvidia is claiming that this is going to be an even bigger uplift in performance than when Pascal succeeded Maxwell in 2016.
Today, Nvidia has kicked off this generation with three graphics cards: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070.
Nvidia GeForce Special Event live blog as it happened
All times in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)
12:39pm: That’s a wrap, we got the RTX 3090, the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3070. The 3080 will probably be the de facto card for 4K gaming, but if you want to do 8K gaming, you can do it with a $1,499 price tag – I’ll probably swallow my pride and get it, because I need the latest and greatest. However, most people should wait to see what AMD has to offer with RDNA 2 before they decide.
12:38pm: Nvidia is calling this the greatest generational jump ever, but that $1,499 price tag for the RTX 3090 is going to be hard to swallow. But if you need that level of performance, it’s going to be there.
12:35pm: Nvidia is talking about Titan right now, could we be seeing the rumored RTX 3090 now? I spoke too soon, it’s here. Oh boy, look at that thicc graphics card. Jensen is calling it a “BFGPU”. Triple slot card, 30 degrees cooler than Titan RTX. Can legit play games at 8K.
12:33pm: “To all my Pascal gaming friends, it is safe to upgrade now” – Jensen Huang, 2020.
12:31pm: The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 will be faster than the 2080 Ti, but coming in at just $499. If true – we’ll have to test it ourselves – it will be an incredible value for the money.
12:30pm: GDDR6X should be nearly twice as fast as GDDR6. It’s got 2 individually controlled fans, pulling air through the back side and outputting it at the back of the card. Apparently its 3x quieter and can cool 90W more than the Turing Founders Edition – which is good. The RTX 3080 is apparently twice as fast as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 at the same price. This makes me nervous about the RTX 3090 price. Starts at $699, available on September 17.
12:27pm: Here it is, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, with GDDR6X memory, 3rd Gen Tensor Cores, 2nd Gen RT Cores. Also that ugly shroud design is here to stay, but definitely interested in that unique airflow. Jensen was hiding it behind his spatulas this whole time, right where it belongs.
12:25pm: Nvidia RTX IO is the answer to the PS5 storage, with a pipeline loading information straight from the SSD to the graphics card, cutting out the CPU bottleneck. This is exactly what I was hoping for here, PC will still be the best place to play.
12:22pm: Ampere got more than 4x better performance in that Marbles demo than the Turing Quadro card, running at 1440p with 30 fps. incredible.
12:20pm: Time for Marbles at night, a fully path-traced demo. A basic version of this demo was shown off at GTC running at 720p 24fps with a Turing Quadro RTX 8000, this is running on an Ampere GPU. This looks absolutely incredible, we will probably not see a game like this any time soon, but can you imagine what ray tracing will look like in a few years if this is what we can do right now?
12:17: Nvidia Ampere Tensor cores deliver nearly 3x the performance of Turing Tensor cores, and almost 2x the RT performance – too good. Ampere RTX will have 28 Billion transistors, a big GPU. Samsung 8nm architecture, and top-of-the-line energy efficiency. Nvidia is also promising 2x the performance.
12:15pm: This AI is going to be used to make ray tracing more accessible. The idea is that ray tracing costs way more computational power per pixel to deliver images, so DLSS lets you render less pixels, with virtually the same performance.
12:13pm: Nvidia is talking about Deep Learning, something that has been a big deal with its pro-level products, but we’re going to see more accurate animations and ray tracing. If I’ve learned anything from the Ampere stuff we’ve seen for AI and Science workloads, it’s going to be super impressive.
12:10pm: Nvidia Omniverse Machinima is an RTX-powered app that will help creators make content out of their favorite games. I am definitely not talented enough to do anything with this, but can’t wait to see what other people do with it.
12:07pm: I really love RTX voice, and it looks like Nvidia is creating a whole suite of technology like this, now called Nvidia Broadcast. You can even use your GPU to give yourself a virtual green screen. Nvidia is demoing this with game streaming, but I’ll definitely be using it in meetings when I’m too lazy to clean my room.
12:05pm: Nvidia is talking about Nvidia Reflex, which should boost esports play by reducing graphics latency. Something that AMD beat Team Green to, but we’re happy this kind of technology is available in different cards. We’re also getting new GSync displays with a 360Hz refresh rate. Esports folks are definitely getting some juicy tech this generation. Alienware, Acer and others will all have these new panels.
12:04pm: Fortnite is getting ray traced shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion and DLSS 2.0, which means one of the biggest games in the world will have #RTXOn.
12:02pm: We’re live from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s kitchen, and he’s telling us about an “amazing GPU”. Hopefully it’s more than one…
12:01pm: We’re live, and Nvidia is doing exactly what it was doing with its Twitter account over the last month: giving us a montage of the last couple of decades of PC gaming. Some of my favorite games are here, most of which have actually been played on Nvidia graphics cards.
12:00pm: Here we go! If you want to watch along we have a convenient little guide right here. Here’s to hoping Nvidia doesn’t double the prices of graphics cards again.
11:45am: Ok people, we got 15 minutes until Nvidia goes live! Let’s get ready to see what the future of Nvidia RTX looks like, and whether or not we’ll really be living a ray traced future.
11:30am: T-minus 30 minutes until the event kicks off in earnest. Now that we’re in a post-pandemic world with no live audience, I’m wondering just how fast the event is going to be (read, dreading). Still, interested to see how a new graphics card launch will look like on the eve of a gaming console generation launch. With the PS5 and Xbox Series X just a couple months off, these new cards have to be very impressive.
11:00am: We have heard so many rumors about Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series, that really I’m just excited for the actual news to come out so we can be done with speculation (for now). Will the RTX 3070 have GDDR6 memory instead of GDDR6X? Will the RTX 3090 be twice as fast as the 2080 Ti? Who knows? Are both true? Are neither? My money’s on the latter. Either way, both of us TechRadar computing editors are ready for the launch.
im officiallly ready for the nvidia geforce event later today pic.twitter.com/MSIHSnUQNASeptember 1, 2020
Looking forward to the Nvidia launch later! Time to retire my RTX Titan? (no) pic.twitter.com/7eLviJkNcSSeptember 1, 2020
10:10 am: We’re online and ready for Nvidia’s stream to kick off. We’ve got some Nvidia RTX cards on hand to say goodbye to as the new cards arrive, and some coffee to get us ready for what’s surely going to be a chaotic event.