NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 is officially announced as the ultimate gaming graphics card for $699 US. The GeForce RTX 3080 makes use of the Ampere GPU architecture which is making its official debut on the consumer PC gaming segment today.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ultimate Gaming Graphics Card Unveiled - 8704 Cores, 10 GB GDDR6X VRAM, Next-Gen Founders Edition Design, Insanely Faster Than An RTX 2080 Ti For $699 US

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is a force to be reckoned with. It is the ultimate gaming GPU that is surprisingly much faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which is its Turing based predecessor but is also much cheaper at just $699 US. The GeForce RTX 3080 carries more cores, more memory, higher performance efficiency, and also carries next-generation ray-tracing and tensor cores that make this a truly next-generation graphics card.

NVIDIA designed the GeForce RTX 3080 not just for any gamer but all gamers who want to have the best graphics performance at hand to power the next-generation of AAA gaming titles with superb visuals and insane fluidity. It's not just the FPS that matters these days, its visuals, and a smoother frame rate too and this is exactly what the GeForce RTX 30 series is made to excel at. There's a lot to talk about regarding NVIDIA's flagship Ampere gaming graphics cards so let's start off with the specifications.

Marvels of NVIDIA Ampere Architecture - 2nd Generation RTX

Enabling the blistering performance of the new RTX 30 Series GPUs and the NVIDIA Ampere architecture are cutting-edge technologies and over two decades of graphics R&D, including:

New streaming multiprocessors:The building block for the world’s fastest, most efficient GPU, delivering 2x the FP32 throughput of the previous generation, and 30 Shader-TFLOPS of processing power.Second-gen RT Cores:New dedicated RT Cores deliver 2x the throughput of the previous generation, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute, with 58 RT-TFLOPS of processing power.Third-gen Tensor Cores:New dedicated Tensor Cores, with up to 2x the throughput of the previous generation, making it faster and more efficient to run AI-powered technologies, likeNVIDIA DLSS, and 238 Tensor-TFLOPS of processing power.NVIDIA RTX IO:Enables rapid GPU-based loading and game asset decompression, accelerating input/output performance by up to 100x compared with hard drives and traditional storage APIs. In conjunction with Microsoft’s new DirectStorage for Windows API,RTX IOoffloads dozens of CPU cores’ worth of work to the RTX GPU, improving frame rates and enabling near-instantaneous game loading.World’s fastest graphics memory:NVIDIA has worked with Micron to create the world’s fastest discrete graphics memory for the RTX 30 Series, GDDR6X. It provides data speeds of close to 1TB/s system memory bandwidth for graphics card applications, maximizing game and app performance.Next-gen process technology:New 8N NVIDIA custom process from Samsung, which allows for higher transistor density and more efficiency.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Graphics Card Specifications - GA102 GPU & 10 GB GDDR6X Memory

At the heart of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card lies the GA102 GPU. The GA102 is one of the many Ampere GPUs that we will be getting on the gaming segment. The GA102 GPU is the fastest gaming GPU that NVIDIA has produced. The GPU is based on Samsung's 8nm custom process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and features a total of 28 Billion transistors. It measures at 628mm2 which makes it the 2nd biggest gaming GPU ever produced right below the Turing TU102 GPU.

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The new shader core on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is 2.7x faster, the new RT cores are 1.7x faster while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than the previous generation Turing GPUs. The 2nd Generation RT core delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray-tracing performance & features twice the ray/triangles intersection with concurrent RT graphics and compute operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3080, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 68 SM units on its flagship which results in a total of 8704 CUDA cores. In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 also comes packed with next-generation RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multi-processor units.

In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3080 comes packed with 10 GB of memory and that too the next-generation GDDR6X design. With Micron's latest and greatest graphics memory dies, the RTX 3080 can deliver GDDR6X memory speeds of 19.0 Gbps. That along with a bus interface of 320-bit will deliver a cumulative bandwidth of 760 Gbps.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series 'Ampere' Graphics Card Specifications: