The GeForce RTX 30 series is a suite of

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s (GPUs) developed by

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

, succeeding the GeForce RTX 20 series. The GeForce RTX 30 series is based on the

Ampere The ampere ( , ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to 1 c ...

architecture, which features Nvidia's second-generation ray tracing (RT) cores and third-generation

Tensor Cores Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is a suite of real-time deep learning image enhancement and upscaling technologies developed by Nvidia that are available in a number of video games. The goal of these technologies is to allow the majority of t ...

. Part of the

Nvidia RTX Nvidia RTX (also known as Nvidia GeForce RTX under the GeForce brand) is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, used in mainstream PCs for gaming as well as being used in workstations for designing complex large-scale model ...

series, hardware-enabled

real-time ray tracing In 3D computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for modeling Light transport theory, light transport for use in a wide variety of Rendering (computer graphics), rendering algorithms for generating digital image, digital images. On a spectr ...

is featured on GeForce RTX 30 series cards. The lineup, designed to compete with

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Radeon RX 6000 series The Radeon RX 6000 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by AMD, based on their RDNA 2 architecture. It was announced on October 28, 2020 and is the successor to the Radeon RX 5000 series. It consists of the entry-level R ...

of cards, consists of the entry-level and previously laptop-exclusive RTX 3050 and laptop-exclusive RTX 3050 Ti, mid-range RTX 3060, upper-midrange RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 high-end RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 10 GB, RTX 3080 12 GB and enthusiast RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, and RTX 3090 Ti. This is the last generation from Nvidia to have official support for Windows 7 and 8.x as the latest drivers available for this generation require Windows 10. The GeForce RTX 30 series began shipping on September 17, 2020. The initial launch, consisting of the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090, occurred during the

2020–2023 global chip shortage Between 2020 and 2023, there was a worldwide chip shortage affecting more than 169 industries, which led to major price increases, long queues, and reselling among consumers and manufacturers for automobiles, graphics cards, video game console ...

, resulting in widespread and notable shortages of the series as a whole that lasted from the series' launch until 2022. The GeForce RTX 30 series was succeeded by the GeForce RTX 40 series, powered by the

Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-pur ...

microarchitecture, which first launched in 2022.

Release and availability issues

Launch day for the RTX 3080 was September 17, 2020. The lack of pre-order functionality and high demand exacerbated by the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, and boost in scalping, resulted in a large number of online retailers struggling with the sheer number of purchases.

Newegg Newegg Commerce, Inc., is an American online retailer of items including computer hardware and consumer electronics. It is based in Diamond Bar, California. It is majority-owned by Hangzhou Liaison Interactive Information Technology Co., a Chines ...

had completely sold out as expected on Black Friday. Long lines formed outside physical stores with stock, such as Micro Center in the United States, and in Japan. Twitter users reported that they used bots to buy large numbers of cards to resell for higher prices. Nvidia released a statement the following day, apologizing for the difficulties with their online store, which went down on launch day due to high traffic. On October 2, Nvidia announced that it would delay the release of RTX 3070 cards by two weeks to guarantee availability. On October 5, Nvidia CEO

Jensen Huang Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang ( zh, t=黃仁勳, poj=N̂g Jîn-hun, hp=Huáng Rénxūn; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president, co-founder, and chief executive of ...

announced delays due to supply shortages, which were expected to go on until 2021. On October 9, the company announced that all Founder's Edition graphic cards in the United States would temporarily be sold via

Best Buy Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was r ...

, while the official web store would be upgraded to improve the shopping experience. In early December, Nvidia blamed continued component shortages on Samsung

wafer A wafer is a crisp, often sweet, very thin, flat, light biscuit, often used to decorate ice cream, and also used as a garnish on some sweet dishes. They frequently have a waffle surface pattern but may also be patterned with insignia of the foo ...

shortages, resulting in chip shortages, among other factors. Shortages of RTX 30 series cards continued into 2021, and has been ongoing ever since its release. In an effort to limit purchases by cryptominers, Nvidia announced in February that the RTX 3060 cards would be able to detect algorithms for mining of the Ethereum cryptocurrency and halve the hash rate. Shortly after release, Nvidia accidentally released a driver update which disabled the detection. In March, TechRadar reported that the shortages could continue until the third quarter of the year, in part blaming a global GDDR6 memory shortage and the cards' supply being bought out by

cryptominer A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records ...

s. In April, Hong Kong Customs and Excise seized 300 non-video CMP cards. Nvidia officially announced new RTX 3080, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti Limited Hash Rate (LHR) SKUs on May 18, 2021, which limits the Ethash mining hash rate. Nvidia released the RTX 3080 Ti on June 3, and the RTX 3070 Ti one week later, on June 10. Both included the cryptocurrency mining hash rate limiter. There have been multiple attempts to meet the demand. EVGA has a system designed to put people into a queue; the goal is to prevent cards from selling out quickly and decrease wait time. Besides the Founders Edition, there are also a variety of aftermarket cards, referred to as "custom cards" by Nvidia. The graphics chip is taken from Nvidia and parts of the card are modified according to the company's specifications. Such modifications include: clock speeds, fans, heat sinks, connectors, and aesthetics. Such aftermarket cards tend to perform better than Nvidia's in-house cards, but such increased performance comes with tradeoffs in temperature and power consumption. Manufacturers include:

Gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The SI prefix, prefix ''giga-, giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte i ...

, MSI, ZOTAC,

Asus ASUSTeK Computer Inc. (, , , ; stylized as ASUSTeK or ASUS) is a Taiwanese Multinational corporation, multinational computer, phone hardware and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Beitou District, Taipei, Taiwan. Its products include deskto ...

, EVGA, INNO3D. Nvidia officially released the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card on January 11, 2022 and the desktop GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card on January 27, 2022. The RTX 3050 had previously only had a laptop variant that was launched on May 11, 2021 along with the laptop variant of the RTX 3050 Ti that currently still has no desktop variant. Nvidia officially released the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti on March 29, 2022.

Details

Architectural improvements of the Ampere architecture include the following: *

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

Compute Capability 8.6 *

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

8 nm 8N (8LPH) process (custom designed for Nvidia) * Doubled FP32 performance per SM on Ampere GPUs * Third-generation Tensor Cores with FP16, bfloat16, TensorFloat-32 (TF32) and sparsity acceleration * Second-generation Ray Tracing Cores, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute *

GDDR6X Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR6 SDRAM) is a type of Synchronous dynamic random-access memory#Synchronous graphics RAM .28SGRAM.29, synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high Bandwidth ...

memory support (RTX 3060Ti GDDR6X Version, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3080 12 GB, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 3090 Ti) *

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

4.0 *

NVLink NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications protocol, communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central ...

3.0 (RTX 3090, RTX 3090 Ti) *

HDMI 2.1 High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary digital interface used to transmit high-quality video and audio signals between devices. It is commonly used to connect devices such as televisions, computer monitors, projectors, g ...

supporting FRL6 (48 Gbit/s) transmission speed *

PureVideo PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occupie ...

Feature Set K hardware video decoding with

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...

hardware decoding

Desktop

* All the RTX 30 GPUs are made using the 8 nm Samsung node. * Only the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti support 2-way

. * RTX 3050 feature limited 8 lanes for the

PCIe 4.0 PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as PCI, PCI ...

bus interface. All other cards support the full ×16 bandwidth. * Double-precision (

FP64 Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Double prec ...

) performance of the

chips are 1/64 of single-precision (

FP32 Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floati ...

) performance.

Laptop

* All mobile RTX 30 GPUs support fourth-generation Max-Q. The decision to enable Max-Q Technologies such as Dynamic Boost 2.0 and WhisperMode 2.0 on devices is handled by its manufacturer. * All models feature

GDDR6 Graphics Double Data Rate 6 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR6 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth, "double data rate" interface, designed for use in graphics cards, game con ...

memory.

Reception

RTX 3090 Ti

According to ''

TechRadar ''TechRadar'' is an online technology publication owned by Future plc. It has editorial teams in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that provide news and reviews of tech products and gadgets. It was launched in 2008 and expanded t ...

'', "the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is an incredibly powerful graphics card". However, the problem would be that the RTX 3090 offers similar performance while "it costs significantly less." In addition to its price, they criticized the RTX 3090 Ti's high power consumption. The performance was praised, as the 3090 Ti "will likely be the go-to GPU for creative professionals that need brute force in their day-to-day work." In gaming, "the RTX 3090 Ti fares quite a bit better" compared to the RTX 3090, and even in 8K "will be able to hit a solid 60 fps in many games at high settings."

RTX 3090

PC Gamer ''PC Gamer'' is a magazine and website founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future plc. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games m ...

'' described the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 as a "frankly enormous graphics card", which is "supremely powerful" and "more worthy of its Titan credentials than the GeForce branding", as for the average gamer "it doesn't deliver enough over the RTX 3080 to make sense, but for the pro-creator it's a workload-crushing card."

RTX 3080

GamesRadar ''GamesRadar+'' (formerly ''GamesRadar'') is an entertainment website for video game-related news, previews, and reviews. It is owned by Future plc. In late 2014, Future Publishing-owned sites ''Total Film'', '' SFX'', '' Edge'' and ''Computer ...

'' praised the RTX 3080 for its capability to "run almost any game at 4K60fps with ray tracing" and found that it offers "4K gaming at an accessible price for the first time ever". According to ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American Technology journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

'', "4K gaming arrived with the RTX 2080 Ti", but "the RTX 3080 does the same and more at a much more affordable price point." Overall, the RTX 3080 would be "great for 1440p or 4K gaming"; however, they criticized the requirement of a 750W power supply as well as the 10GB of VRAM regarding future games.

RTX 3070

Jim McGregor from ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' found that "the RTX 3070 is the perfect solution for the more mainstream gamer", while "the competitive gamer or high-end creator will still likely opt for the GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090."

Notes

References

External links

Official website

NVIDIA AMPERE GA102 GPU ARCHITECTURE whitepaper
* {{NVIDIA Computer-related introductions in 2020 3000 series Golden Joystick Award winners Graphics processing units Graphics cards Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the video game industry