What’s New For The GeForce RTX 30 Series?

It’s been two years since the last launch of the previous generation of graphics cards with the NVIDIA Turing™ architecture in 2018. Everyone has been patiently waiting for this day so let’s jump right into it. What’s new?

GPU Architecture

The newest generation of graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 30 series, will be shifting to an all-new NVIDIA Ampere architecture. In short, it’s going to bring much more performance with more bandwidth and faster technologies such as:

• 2nd gen ray tracing cores
• 3rd gen tensor cores
• PCI Express Gen 4
• GDDR6X graphics memory

There is a lot more to the NVIDIA Ampere architecture than listed above but these are likely to be the more noticeable changes for many. You can learn more about it here.

More Memory

We mean a lot of it. Up to 24GB of GDDR6X graphics memory on a single graphics card. The previous gen graphics card only had up to 11GB of GDDR6 graphics memory (2080 Ti). This is more than double the amount. We look forward to see how developers and their games take advantage of the generous amount of ultra-fast graphics memory.

More Bandwidth

This new generation of graphics cards adopt PCI Express 4.0 whereas the previous generation utilized PCI Express 3.0. This doesn’t mean users without a PCIE 4.0 hardware slot will be left out from being able to use the new graphics cards. The new graphics cards will still work with PCIE 3.0 / PCIE 2.0 slots as it is backwards compatible. So upgrade away but always do your due diligence and check for hardware compatibility.

HDMI 2.1

You will now be able to drive an 8K display / 60Hz refresh or 4K / 120Hz refresh using a single HDMI cable now that the new generation of graphics cards support HDMI 2.1. Of course you’ll still need a HDMI 2.1 ready/compatible display AND a ultra high speed HDMI 2.1 compatible cable.

NVIDIA NVLINK™ SLI-Ready

The feature to use up to 2 graphics cards is still here for the new generation of graphics cards. You’ll need a compatible NVLink Bridge to connect them as with the previous generation of cards. The main difference is that only the 3090 Series will support it.