NVIDIA officially announced its 30-series GPU lineup this morning and what’s on offer seems to really kick things up a notch, all at a decent price.
The two main takeaways from the NVIDIA announcement are that the 30-series GPU lineup offers a massive boost to performance, and that it accomplishes that while still being made available at a lower price than the 20-series GPUs.
At least when you factor in their initial launch price. The cost of the 20-series GPUs is likely to drop now that the 30-series will be available soon. So the 30-series may not be less expensive for long. But with the advancements these new cards are bringing, you’d be hard pressed to find a good reason to go with an older card. Save for a really, really good deal on cost
NVIDIA 30-series GPU lineup starts at a price of $499
$499 is a lot to spend on PC parts. But what gamers should be focusing on is not necessarily the $499 price tag. Rather the focus should be on the comparison in cost to the last-gen cards and the huge boost to performance.
When you consider those things, living on the cutting edge is much more enticing. $499 is what you’ll pay for the GeForce RTX 3070. NVIDIA’s entry-level card from this series.
The crazy part is that NVIDIA touts the GeForce RTX 3070 as being faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Which was its big boy card with a price tag to match from the previous series. If you want to bump things up, there’s the GeForce RTX 3080.
That will retail for $699, and it’ll be up to twice as fast as GeForce RTX 2080. Then there’s the GeForce RTX 3090 which retails for $1,499. That’s a lot to be sure, but it’ll allow you to take advantage of the 8K gaming capabilities of LG’s 2020 8K OLED TVs. Which now support the 30-series GPUs.
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On the more technical side of things the 30-series GPUs come with new tech called NVIDIA DLSS.
NVIDIA refers to this as one of the biggest graphics breakthroughs of the past decade. And it’s only available on RTX cards. It uses artificial intelligence to improve performance in demanding games while also delivering images that NVIDIA says are comparable to native resolution.
In addition to the DLSS, the 30-series GPUs also come with a handful of “world-first” features. Such as HDMI 2.1 support, low-profile leaf springs and new 12-pin power connectors, and much better cooling than previous generation GPUs.
NVIDIA dives deeper into all these improvements and performance boosts in its official blog post, which you can find here.