Nvidia presents GeForce RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070

At last. Hardware junkies have had to wait over two years for new graphics cards from Nvidia. Okay, there was the super refresh, but it didn't really bring anything new - apart from the chaos of names, which only real fans could keep track of.

These are the cards and what they can do

With the Geforce 30 series, Nvidia promises twice the performance of the 20 series. Even the RTX 3070 is expected to deliver more performance than the current flagship, the 2080 Ti. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks of the biggest generational leap to date. Here is an overview of the cards:

With Ampere, Nvidia is taking the step from 12 nm production to 8 nm production. The chips are manufactured by Samsung. The basic component of the Nvidia GPU is still the streaming multiprocessor (SM). The comparable counterpart from AMD is called the Compute Unit (CU).

The predecessor architecture Turing, on which the RTX 20 series is based, has brought some innovations to the SM: ray tracing and tensor cores. As expected, Nvidia is adding a few more cores here. However, the manufacturer does not provide any specific figures in the presentation, instead relying on TFLOP data.

Nvidia relies on the so-called flow-through design for cooling the new cards. One fan draws in fresh air from below and blows it out at the rear near the connections, while the other fan also draws in fresh air from below and transports it upwards through the cooling fins, where it is to be expelled from the housing. It remains to be seen whether Nvidia's board partners will take over the cooling system. According to Nvidia, the cards should be 20 degrees cooler than with the Turing design.

PCIe 4.0 is also new on board. Nvidia announces RTX IO with the new generation. Games are now streamed directly from the SSD to the fast G6X memory of the graphics card. This should make loading times a thing of the past. Our colleague Philipp Rüegg will be pleased that the cards also support HDMI 2.1, now he can finally make full use of his LG OLED TV as a gamer monitor

Even if Jensen Huang didn't say so in the presentation: Ray tracing has not yet caught on with Turing. There are still few games that support the technology. The RTX 30 series is now set to make ray tracing the new standard. One of the top dogs is already on board: Fortnite will soon receive the ray tracing update and the blockbuster "Cyberpunk 2077" should also be RTX-capable when it is released in November.

When will these things be available?

The RTX 3080 will be available from 17 September, the RTX 3090 from 24 September and the RTX 3070 sometime in October. And this time, Nvidia isn't even increasing the prices - at least not for the 3080 and 3070, which are expected to cost the same as their predecessors.

Colleague Yannick Cejka will tell you exactly when they will be available and how much they will cost in Swiss francs. As soon as I get my hands on the cards, I'll write reviews. Then I can also tell you whether the promised performance is actually true