The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s 3000 series flagship. It takes the crown as the fastest consumer graphics card money can buy. Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, which supersedes Turing, offers both improved power efficiency and performance. The 3090 features 10,496 CUDA cores and 328 Tensor cores, it has a base clock of 1.4 GHz boosting to 1.7 GHz, 24 GB of memory and a power draw of 350 W. The 3090 offers more than double the memory and beats the previous generation’s flagship RTX 2080 Ti significantly in terms of effective speed. That said, the 3090 also comes with a hefty $1,500 price tag. Professional users, such as game developers, that can make use of 24 GB of memory, may find value in the 3090. Regular users should be wary of the hype around 8k gaming. High end gamers ought to consider the 3080 which offers comparable gaming performance for less than half the money. In terms of real world performance, Nvidia’s 3000 series has more or less put AMD’s Radeon group in checkmate. Nonetheless, AMD’s marketers are capable of delivering elaborate BS albeit whilst struggling to keep a straight face. Their marketing infrastructure outsold Intel in the CPU market despite a 15% performance deficit. Without an appropriate social media marketing strategy, Nvidia will probably lose considerable market share, for all the wrong reasons.[Sep '20GPUPro]
MORE DETAILS
“Build it, and they will come” must be NVIDIA’s thinking behind their latest consumer-focused GPU: the RTX 2080 Ti, which has been released alongside the RTX 2080. Following on from the Pascal architecture of the 1080 series, the 2080 series is based on a new Turing GPU architecture which features Tensor cores for AI (thereby potentially reducing GPU usage during machine learning workloads) and RT cores for ray tracing (rendering more realistic images). Unfortunately, there aren’t (m)any games that make use of these capabilities so the $1200 price tag on the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition is difficult to justify. The 2080 Ti also features Turing NVENC which is far more efficient than CPU encoding and alleviates the need for casual streamers to use a dedicated stream PC. On paper the 2080 Ti has 4352 CUDA cores, a base/boost clock of 1350/1545 MHz, 11GB of GDRR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 616GB/s. The upshot is that it has around a 30% faster effective speed than the 1080 Ti, which at 18 months old continues to offer comparable value for money and currently dominates the high-end gaming market. Professional users such as game developers or 4K gamers may find value in the 2080 Ti but for typical users (@1080p), prices need to drop substantially before the 2080 Ti has much chance of widespread adoption.[Sep '18GPUPro]
