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Nvidia unveils new GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs

Similar to the Turing GPUs, the Ampere-based 30 series are designed for ray tracing, a rendering technique that creates realistic lighting effects.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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NVIDIA added to its lineup of gaming GPUs on Tuesday, rolling out a trio of gaming cards based on Ampere architecture that are designed to make real-time ray tracing more accessible. The chipmaker said the RTX 30 series offers twice the performance and  power efficiency over the previous Turing-based GPUs.

Similar to the Turing GPUs, the Ampere-based 30 series are designed for ray tracing -- a rendering technique that creates realistic lighting effects. In addition to real-time ray tracing, this new lineup of GPUs also delivers greater AI processing performance, offering up to 238 Tensor flops, as well as support for advanced shading. 

"Today's launch of NVIDIA Ampere GPUs is a giant step into the future," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "The work of thousands of engineering years, the GeForce RTX 30 series delivers our greatest generational leap ever. NVIDIA RTX fuses programmable shading, ray tracing and AI for developers to create entirely new worlds. Twenty years from now, we'll look back and realize that the future of gaming started here."

Nvidia said the RTX 3090 is the world's first GPU able to play games at 60 fps in 8K resolution. It will ship in September and is priced at $1,499. 

"RTX 3090 is a beast — a big ferocious GPU," Huang said. "The 3090 is so big that for the very first time, we can play games at 60 frames per second in 8K. This is insane."

Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 comes with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, 28 billion transistors and will be priced at $699. Huang said the 3080 is Nvidia's "new flagship GPU." The cheapest card is the RTX 3070, which is priced at $499.

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