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When Jenson Huang, CEO of Nvidia officially revealed the RTX 3000 series at the start of September, it ushered in the hotly anticipated next generation of graphics cards we have been long waiting for.
It has been two years since the launch of the RTX 2000 series. While it was an improvement over the GTX 1000 series in that it brought us real time ray-tracing and DLSS for the first time, these were extras; niceties, or the cherry on the top of the meat and potatoes that is the raw rasterisation performance of a card.
With the RTX 2080 merely equalling the rasterisation performance of the now somewhat legendary GTX 1080 Ti, it came as a bit of a let down, as effectively for the same price as the GTX 1080 Ti the RTX 2080 was delivering the exact same performance two years on. It made zero sense to upgrade.
The RTX 2080 Ti was a genuine performance boost but at such crazy prices it was a tough sell.
Raytracing and DLSS game title support was non-existent at launch and even today we are far from seeing prolific adoption. It is quite the chicken and the egg problem. With no hardware support game developers won’t make games that support raytracing, and without the games to run on the hardware, consumers aren’t going to want to buy hardware that otherwise performs the same as their current cards.
But Nvidia has forged ahead and with the big DLSS 2.0 improvement rolled out, “RTX On” is becoming more and more relevant.
AMD has been stuck trying to break past GTX 1080 Ti levels of performance as well with its latest and greatest in the RX 5700 XT only able to match it at best. But AMD appears to be making great strides with its RDNA2 based graphics architecture found in both next gen consoles, with support for ray-tracing and all whispers pointing to “Big Navi”, (which will be revealed in October), being faster than a RTX 2080 Ti, AMD should be within striking distance of the RTX 3080’s raster performance.
According to some early benchmark results, the RTX 3080 is about thirty percent faster than the RTX 2080 Ti in raw rasterisation performance, which is a great generational improvement and finally gives GTX 1080 Ti owners something truly worth upgrading to.
The massive RTX 3090 though is quite an interesting beast of a card. Jenson Huang said it was a Titan-class product for the masses, yet it is not called a Titan and is priced just a little higher than the RTX 2080 Ti was. With 24GB of memory it’s clearly aimed more towards productivity yet is US$1,000 cheaper than the previous Titan card, making it much more accessible to the masses, but for double the price of the RTX 3080 and with just twenty percent more CUDA cores, it’s definitely on the wrong end of the price-to-performance scale gamers like to see.
It has taken four years for Nvidia to finally have made a step function improvement in performance. Now we just need to see what secret sauce AMD has been baking all this time into the next-gen consoles, and what that will eventually mean for its next generation of discrete graphics cards launching after October.
“The RTX 3080 ... is a great generational improvement and finally gives GTX 1080 Ti owners something truly worth upgrading to.”