Nvidia Graphics Card Review
Nvidia has announced its new flagship cards to release on September 17th 2020. There will be three cards coming out:
· RTX 3090 at £1,499.99
· RTX 3080 at £649.00
· RTX 3070 at £469.00
These cards are built using the new Ampere architecture versus the old Turing architecture that cards like the RTX 2080 Ti of the last generation of graphics cards used. This new architecture will apparently improve performance and quality of raytracing (RTX). The prices of these cards, in my opinion are what really sets the apart from last gen’s. The best card from the previous generation was the RTX 2080 Titan, it cost £1,552. This means we will get better performance and quality for a cheaper price. The reason for this was that when the previous generation was created Nvidia thought the raytracing (ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. The technique is capable of producing a high degree of visual realism, more so than typical scanlines rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where taking a relatively long time to render can be tolerated, such as in still computer-generated images, and film and television visual effects (VFX), but more poorly suited to real-time applications such as video game, where speed is critical in rendering each frame. Karl Healy is often cited as the father of ray tracing due to his in depth work in the field of computer graphics.) would be worth the higher price tag but as time wore on, not many games utilized raytracing. This made Nvidia lose out on their estimated profits and that is why, I believe they are lowering the price tags this time around.
Another thing these cards will do is make streaming and creating videos easier with the Nvidia Broadcast app which uses powerful AI capabilities to improve your video and sound quality.
Nvidia has also removed the Sli bridge on the new graphics cards which means that you will not be able to use two graphics cards in the same PC, this never really took off and I would assume that this is the reason they are removing it. It didn’t really make a huge performance improvement anyway.
Geforce RTX 30 Series GPUs also feature several world firsts; they’re the first gaming class graphics cards with up to twenty four gigabytes of new blazing fast
GDDR6X VRAM; they’re the first GPU’s with the long awaited HDMI 2.1 for 4k refresh rates and gaming at 8k. They are also the first discrete GPUs with support for the AV1 codec, enabling us to watch high-resolution streams using significantly less bandwidth.
The founder’s edition cards apparently feature excellent cooling. For the 30 Series, Nvidia has created a completely new fan designed that, originally confused consumers. They have created a dual axial flow through a new cooling solution, featuring two fans – one at the left front, another at the right rear that draws air through the card. As heat is drawn away from components, it is efficiently distributed across the card and throughout the aluminium fin stack. The left fan pushes air heated by the fin stack out through extra-large GPU bracket vents, while the right fan draws the air towards the top chassis exhaust.
Ordinarily, GPU circuit boards (PCBs) run the length of the card, so in order to insert a fan in the rear Nvidia had to create a smaller PCB. To do this their engineers shrank the NVLink and power connectors, they also managed to pack in 18 phases for increased power delivery. By making these changes Nvidia was able to pack in its smaller PCB.
Acoustically, the new Founders Edition design is quieter than traditional dual axial coolers, while still delivering nearly 2x the cooling performance of previous generation solutions. The aforementioned NVLink and power design changes help here, creating more space for airflow through the largest fin stack seen to date, and the larger bracket vents improve airflow in concert with individually shaped shroud fins. In fact, wherever you look, every aspect of the Founders Edition cards are designed to maximize airflow, minimize temperatures, and enable the highest levels of performance with the least possible noise.
NVIDIA Ampere Streaming Multiprocessors
Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) are at the heart of NVIDIA GPUs, compared to previous-gen SMs on the Turing-architecture GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, new NVIDIA Ampere Architecture SMs offer 2x FP32 throughput for superior performance.
And as with previous generations, they’ve also increased performance per watt, getting gamers even higher frame rates. Together with PCIE 4.0 support, an 18-phase power supply, and new innovative cooling solutions, GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs deliver new performance records even before you overclock.
2nd Generation Ray Tracing Cores & 3rd Generation Tensor Cores
NVIDIA made real-time videogame ray tracing a reality with the invention of Ray Tracing Cores, dedicated processing cores on the GPU specifically designed to tackle performance-intensive ray tracing workloads. On GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs, they are introducing 2nd Generation RT Cores, which have up to 2x the throughput. These enhancements accelerate ray tracing performance by up to 2X. To further accelerate performance in rasterized and ray-traced games, they invented NVIDIA DLSS. This deep learning neural network, powered by dedicated AI processors called Tensor Cores, boosts frame rates while maintaining crisp, clear image quality. GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs feature their 3rd generation Tensor Cores, with up to 2x the throughput of Turing-architecture Tensor Cores, making it faster to run AI-powered technologies and techniques, and opening the door to future features. When enabled, DLSS improves performance in titles such as Control, Minecraft with RTX for Windows 10 and Death Stranding, while generating beautiful, crisp game images that are often clearer and sharper than native resolution rendering with Temporal Anti-Aliasing. And now, they’re introducing a new Ultra Performance mode that enables DLSS to run at up to 8K on the GeForce RTX 3090.
After learning all about these GPUs I am excited to see the benchmarks when they officially launch!