As rumoured, Nvidia has unveiled the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti desktop graphics cards at Computex 2021. Both are powered by the current-gen Ampere architecture and of course support Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technique as well as ray tracing, Reflex latency tuning, and more. The new top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is said to be twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti from a few years ago, and 50 percent faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, while the new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and 1.5X as fast as the GeForce RTX 2070 Super.
Nvidia’s own Founders Edition version of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is priced at $1,199 (approximately Rs. 86,765 before taxes) while the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition will cost $599 (approximately Rs. 43,345). They will go on sale around the world starting on June 3 and June 10 respectively. However, Nvidia is describing its Founders Edition cards as “limited edition”, meaning that they will be in short supply. Third-party OEM partners including Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, Gainward, Inno3D and Galax will announce their own models and prices.
Given the current global shortage of GPUs and resulting price spikes, it is likely that street prices will be much higher. However, Nvidia’s official announcement made no mention of hash rate limiting, a measure rumoured to be introduced to discourage cryptocurrency mining using GPUs, which has caused the worldwide supply crunch.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti features 10,240 CUDA cores running at a base 1.37GHz with a boost speed of 1.67GHz. It will ship with 12GB of GDDR6X RAM on a 384-bit bus. It has a 350W power rating. Its new sibling, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU is made up of 6,144 CUDA cores and has base and boost speeds of 1.58GHz and 1.77GHz respectively. Cards will have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus, with a 220W power rating.
In addition to desktop GPUs, Nvidia also showed off several new and recently launched gaming and productivity laptops that feature GeForce RTX GPUs, including the brand new Alienware x15, a 16mm thin gaming laptop with a 15-inch 1440p G-Sync screen and GeForce RTX 3080 GPU.
Nvidia also announced that the number of games and applications that support ray tracing and/or DLSS has now grown to 130, with new entrants including Doom Eternal, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rainbow 6 Siege, and Icarus. Fortnite, which already supports RTX technologies, will be getting a new Titanium City map which features a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card as its backdrop, to mark the product launch. Nvdia has also worked with Orbx to release a free mod for Microsoft Flight Simulator that enhances Tapei’s downtown Xinyi district, to celebrate the spirit of Computex 2021.