Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Lands Sept. 17 for $699, RTX 3070 Drops Next Month

Nvidia’s new graphics cards start arriving on Sept. 17 with the GeForce RTX 3080, which will set you back $699. The lower-priced RTX 3070 will go on sale in October for $499, while the monster RTX 3090, which can render games in 8K resolution, drops on Sept. 24 for an obscene $1,499.

Expect the new cards to nearly double the graphics performance from the last-generation GeForce RTX 2000 series, which launched two years ago. According to Nvidia's benchmarks, the performance increase can range from 1.6 times to 2.1 times, depending on the game.

The upgrade is thanks to Nvidia's new GPU architecture, "Ampere," which is built using Samsung's "custom 8N manufacturing process," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said without going into details. The new architecture more than doubles the computing power devoted to graphics shading and to ray-tracing effects.

"Ampere is the biggest generational leap we have ever had," Huang said during the event, which was live streamed on the internet.

The company didn't exactly break down the benchmarks. So it's unclear if Nvidia is talking about frames per second or some other metric. That all said, the GPU maker was able to either double or triple the number of GPU "CUDA" cores on to each new card.

Now let's breakdown each card. The RTX 3080 does feature 10GB of GDDR6X memory, an increase from the 8GB found in the RTX 2080 card.

"It’s up to 2X faster than the original RTX 2080. It consistently delivers more than 60fps at 4K resolution—with RTX ON," Nvidia said, in reference to the RTX ray-tracing effects .

Meanwhile, the RTX 3070 card comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory—the same amount found in the RTX 2070 and RTX 2070 Super cards. However, the company says it's still faster than one of the last generation's most powerful cards, the RTX 2080 Ti, which originally retailed for $1,200. That's pretty astounding if true, so we're looking forward to testing the new card.

The RTX 3090, while wildly expensive, packs a whopping 24GB of GDDR6X memory inside, a massive upgrade from the mere 11GB in the RTX 2080 Ti card.

"The 3090 is so big that for the very first time, we can play games at 60 frames per second in 8K,” Huang said in today's announcement. “This is insane.”

All three graphics cards will be able to stream up to 4K content at 120 frames per second, thanks to the HDMI 2.1 ports, in addition to three DisplayPort 1.4a slots in the back.

The graphics cards can draw more power with the help of a new 12-pin connector, a change from the standard 8-pin. Fortunately, Nvidia and its manufacturing partners plan on including a 12-pin adapter inside every GPU sold, ensuring compatibility with existing PC power supplies. 

The cards will be available through all the major GPU vendors, including Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte. PC makers including Acer and Dell’s Alienware also plan on packing the new GPUs inside their existing desktop units.

As for Nvidia, the company plans on selling special "Founder's editions" of each card when the release dates arrive. You can go to the company's website to receive email notifications for when orders will be available.

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