GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3090: Nvidia’s ‘greatest generational leap ever’

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GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3090: Nvidia’s ‘greatest generational leap ever’

Nvidia unveiled its RTX 30-series graphics cards Tuesday, two long years after the GeForce RTX 20-series kicked off ray tracing in earnest. The wait was worthwhile: The 30-series looks monstrous, spearheaded by a fully loaded, 8K-ready $1,400 GeForce RTX 3090 “BFGPU” that revives the dormant xx90-class brand previously reserved for dual-chip beasts. The $700 GeForce RTX 3080 and $500 GeForce RTX 3070 were also announced. All of them will include a radical new RTX IO technology designed to rival the ultra-fast storage technologies coming to the next-gen consoles.

CEO Jensen Huang calls this the “greatest generational leap ever” for Nvidia’s GeForce cards. Hot damn.

Oh, and ray tracing is coming to Fortnite. And new Nvidia Reflex software will make you much more deadly in esports games. And Nvidia Broadcast will use the AI tensor cores inside these new GPUs to spruce up the audios and visuals of your game streams in real time.

Phew. Let’s dig in.

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The GeForce RTX 3090

GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070 specs and features

The GeForce RTX 3090 is so crammed with new technology that Nvidia needed to create a new 12-pin power connector and a radically overhauled cooling system just to fit it all in. The GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 aren’t quite as ludicrous, but they nevertheless look poised to outpace their predecessors in both traditional and ray traced games—quelling a key criticism of the older RTX 20-series GPUs, which focused more on introducing ray tracing than advancing pure gaming performance.

Bottom line: These suckers will be fast.

Let’s take a look at the light, high-level specifications that Nvidia revealed before diving into the nitty-gritty. Take the performance comparisons with the caveat that they likely cite best-case performance scenarios with ray tracing and DLSS enabled, rather than just traditional gaming frame rates.

GeForce RTX 3090 specs:

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