Nvidia RTX 3090 Spec Breakdown | Game Rant
The launch of Nvidia's new 30-series graphics cards isn't even here yet, but early announcements of specs and pricing are already turning the world of PC building and graphics technology on its head. With performance to beat the 2080Ti, the current king of graphics cards, at less than half the price, the new 3070 is just an indication of the power of higher-end cards. The 3090 promises to be the most powerful graphics card on the market for a long time to come, with performance numbers that beggar belief.
This new line of GPUs is being hailed as the biggest generational leap for graphics tech in over 20 years, and the 3090 sits at the top as the most powerful graphics card to date. At $1,500, it is even pricier than the old 2080Ti, but with 10,496 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM, 82 RT cores, and 328 Tensor cores, its price-to-performance ratio is still far above the previous generation. What do all of those numbers mean for real-world performance? We won't know for absolute certain until cards are in-hand to test, but a quick breakdown of all the 3090's specs will reveal its intended user base, and what it promises to be capable of.
Even for the best of the best, $1500 is a lot to pay for just one part of a PC build. Some may wonder if average gamers will need to fork over that much money just to play next-generation games at their best, but luckily the answer is no. The RTX 3090 is massive overkill for almost all gamers, and is instead aimed squarely at content makers and other creative types. To emphasize that fact, the 3090 is not being pushed as Nvidia's flagship card- the 3080, at a slightly more reasonable $700, has that honor.
The 3090 will be capable of playing games in 8K at 60FPS, while even 4K/60FPS monitors are not common in today's market. That kind of performance just isn't applicable to most players, but it will be important to streamers, youtubers, and other content creators. They will be able to leverage the 3090's excessive-performance to create and stream 4k video, edit and render footage quickly, and take advantage of ray tracing and AI performance for features like RTX voice, green-screen effects, and livestream encoding. The RTX 3090 is not a replacement for the 2080Ti, it is a replacement for RTX TITAN cards, which retailed for $2,500. When that is taken into account, its price tag seems downright accessible for serious content creators who make a living off of the hardware in their PCs.
The new 3000 generation of GPUs represents a major leap in graphics tech, but while the numbers may seem big, they don't mean much to a layman. In short, Nvidia worked with Samsung to create a new, custom 8nm architecture for its graphics cards, which essentially means that more computing power can be crammed into less space and will need less electricity to run efficiently. Nvidia is boasting a 1.9X performance per watt increase, which means that new cards will be roughly twice as efficient in terms of power drawn from the wall.
The number of RT cores in the 3090 sits at 82, far above the 2080Ti's 68. Not only this, but the new RT cores are more powerful per unit than the previous generation. In the previous generation of cards, ray tracing was a gimmick more than anything. It was only really practical if one had a 2080 or higher, and only a handful of games, like Minecraft or Control, really made use of it to a significant degree.
However, this generation, even the more accessible cards will be able to render ray-traced graphics quickly and effectively, meaning that more and more games will see fit to use ray tracing. The 3090 has so much ray tracing power that it will likely be useful for other applications as well, since RT cores can be leveraged for AI acceleration of all sorts of processes.
Likewise, a hefty 24GB of RAM, and exceptionally fast RAM at that, means that the 3090 will be capable of crushing high-volume processes like video rendering, or multitasking to display and stream high-resolution game footage simultaneously. With so much RAM available to the graphics card, Nvidia is also pushing to allow the card to take some of the stress off of the computer's normal system memory, making frame processing even faster and more efficient. All of this boils down to faster frame rates, better response times, and higher resolution gaming with next-generation graphs rendering.
In sum, the 3090 promises to offer roughly twice the performance of a 2080Ti, at a couple of hundred dollars over the 2080Ti's price. Currently, the only people who can truly use that much performance are content creators or gamers with 8K monitors (of which there are almost none). However, the 3090 will push graphics technology forward in the long run, giving game developers a reason to stretch ray tracing to its limits, and hardware manufacturers a reason to start putting out more 4K and even 8K displays, now that more people will actually be able to use them.
The Nvidia RTX 3090 is set to launch September 24th.
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