NVIDIA has finally unveiled and officially announced their new 2nd generation RTX graphics cards, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Family. Powered by NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, the graphics cards are said to offer “the greatest-ever” generation leap; twice the performance over Turing. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card is the flagship card starting at $699. Also, NVIDIA announced the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3090 “BFGPU”, which I’ll discuss in their respective articles. In this article, let’s learn more about the new flagship RTX 3080.
UPDATE: GeForce RTX 3080 Graphics Cards available on Newegg.com here, B&H Photo here
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Graphics Card
Let’s start this article with a short FAQ since it’s easier to digest and get the gist out of this new release.
The GeForce RTX 3080 features 8704 CUDA cores with a boost clock speed of 1.71 GHz. It is paired with a 10GB GDDR6X memory with a speed of 19Gbps, running on a 320-bit memory interface.
During NVIDIA’s “live” event, the company didn’t show any performance number of FPS. We will learn more about that when the review embargo lifts. However, on NVIDIA’s presentation slide, it did mention that the RTX 3080 is “up to 2x faster” than the RTX 2080.
The short answer is yes. The RTX 3080 is faster than the RTX 2080 Ti. But we don’t know the exact numbers yet.
Based on NVIDIA’s spec sheet, the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition has a graphics power of 320W. Expect that custom RTX 3080 from AIB partners will have the same of a bit higher power consumption.
According to the spec sheet, the recommended PSU for the RTX 3080 is 750W. Of course, if you have a lot of components and other peripherals installed in the system that draws power from the PSU, you may need a higher one. I also recommend that you get an 80 Plus certified PSU from a reputable company.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is priced at $699. Expect that custom graphics card from AIB partners will be priced higher. My estimate is around $750 to $850 give or take, depending on the model of the graphics card.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition is a 2-slot graphics card. It has a dimension of 285mm in length and 112mm in width. If you plan to buy a custom graphics card from AIB partners like Asus, MSI, etc they tend to be bigger or larger and will most likely occupy ~3 PCI slots.
The GeForce RTX 3080 will become available starting September 17, 2020.
Well, to quote NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang “To all my Pascal gamer friends, it is safe to upgrade now.”.
In addition, the GeForce RTX 3080 has three DisplayPort 1.4a out and an HDMI 2.1. NVIDIA removed the USB-Type C for VR headsets and there is no NVLink or SLI bridge. Yes, that’s right. SLI / multiple-GPU is pretty much dead.
At this point, I don’t think that the RTX 3080 is the direct replacement of the RTX 2080 Ti. I don’t think that the RTX 3090 is the direct successor of the RTX 2080 Ti as well, since the RTX 3090 succeeds the TITAN RTX.
I also noticed that there is a huge price gap between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, $699 vs $1499. So, perhaps, NVIDIA may release a certain “RTX 3080 Ti” in the future or when AMD releases the Big Navi. Who knows? Don’t quote me on this as I am just speculating as well.
NVIDIA RTX 30 Series Features
Below are the “cutting-edge” technologies that the new RTX 30 Series GPUs and NVIDIA Ampere architecture have to offer:
- New streaming multiprocessors: The building block for the world’s fastest, most efficient GPU, delivering 2x the FP32 throughput of the previous generation, and 30 Shader-TFLOPS of processing power.
- Second-gen RT Cores: New dedicated RT Cores deliver 2x the throughput of the previous generation, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute, with 58 RT-TFLOPS of processing power.
- Third-gen Tensor Cores: New dedicated Tensor Cores, with up to 2x the throughput of the previous generation, making it faster and more efficient to run AI-powered technologies, like NVIDIA DLSS, and 238 Tensor-TFLOPS of processing power.
- NVIDIA RTX IO: Enables rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, accelerating input/output performance by up to 100x compared with hard drives and traditional storage APIs. In conjunction with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API, RTX IO offloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to the RTX GPU, improving frame rates and enabling near-instantaneous game loading.
- World’s fastest graphics memory: NVIDIA has worked with Micron to create the world’s fastest discrete graphics memory for the RTX 30 Series, GDDR6X. It provides data speeds of close to 1TB/s system memory bandwidth for graphics card applications, maximizing game and app performance.
- Next-gen process technology: New 8N NVIDIA custom process from Samsung, which allows for higher transistor density and more efficiency.
NVIDIA RTX 30 Series Official Launch Event
In case you missed the launch event and want to watch it. Here’s the video:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Specifications
| RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 | RTX 3070 | RTX 2080 Ti | RTX 2080 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fab Process | 8nm Samsung | 8nm Samsung | 8nm Samsung | 12nm TSMC | 12nm TSMC |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ampere | Ampere | Turing | Turing |
| CUDA Cores | 10496 | 8704 | 5888 | 4352 | 2944 |
| Base Clock | 1400 MHz | 1440 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1350 MHz | 1515 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1700 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1730 MHz | 1545 MHZ 1635 MHz (FE) | 1710 MHz 1800 MHz (FE) |
| Memory Size | 24GB | 10GB | 8GB | 11GB | 8GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6X | GDDR6X | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Memory Clock | 19.5 Gbps | 19 Gbps | 16 Gbps | 14 Gbps | 14 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 936.2 GB/s | 760.3 GB/s | 448.0 GB/s | 616 GB/s | 448 GB/s |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 352-bit | 256-bit |
| Max. GPU Temp. | 93° | 93° | 93° | 89° | 88° |
| Power Connectors | 2x 8-pin | 2x 8-pin | 8-pin | 8+8 pin | 6+8 pin |
| Graphics Card Power | 350W | 320W | 220W | 260W (FE) | 225W (FE) |
| Recommended PSU | 750W | 750W | 650W | 650W | 650W |
| Price | $1,499 | $699 | $499 | $999 (reference) $1,199 (FE) | $799 (reference) $699 (FE) |
Are you planning to get an RTX 3080? What brand will you be getting? Or do you plan to get the “Big Ferocious GPU” RTX 3090 instead?
