(clapboard sounds)
- Did you guys just see the same thing I did?
RTX 3070 is gonna outperform a 2080Ti
at less than half the price, 499.
Is Nvidia insane.
I mean, even with all of the leaks
indicating that Ampere was gonna be super powerful,
I was in no way ready for this, so okay.
(sighs)
Deep breath, there's a lot to get through here,
so let's get started.
After an F in the chat for any recent 2080Ti buyers.
(giggles)
Ouch, like dang.
Oh and also our sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
Now, obviously I'm not ready to hand Nvidia
their crown until we see the new cards for ourselves.
But based on what they've shown,
we are in for one heck of a ride.
They announced well a lot and we're gonna get to all of it,
but the big one is, Ampere is real
and Ampere is an absolute monster.
As it turns out, the recent leaks were accurate in many
if not most ways.
Where Turing based RTX 2000 GPUs were manufactured on TSMC's
12 nanometer FinFET process,
which was actually derived from their 16 nanometer process,
Nvidia instead partnered with Samsung
on a custom eight nanometer process for the RTX 3000 series.
And the difference here is much bigger than we got
moving from Pascal to Turing.
Here's the thing, for over three years now,
G-Force GPUs have had in the neighborhood
of 20 to 25 million transistors per square millimeter,
Ampere around 60 million per square millimeter,
that's over double,
and breaking with what's become their habit lately,
they didn't just use this increase in density
to lower their own costs
and keep selling a similar performance
with some new features tacked on.
The RTX 3080 boasts over 28 billion
that's with a B transistors.
What does that get us?
Well for starters, PCI Express Gen 4,
upgraded Tensor cores and Oh,
and casually more than double the CUDA cores
across the board.
And here's the kicker, that's not compared to the cards
that each of the 3000 series GPU replaces,
that's compared to the previous generations step up.
I'm not kidding, on paper every Ampere card
that was announced, even the 3070 is faster than a 2080Ti.
To find the last time that this happened,
a third rundown GPU being faster
than the previous flagship,
I had to dig pretty deep through the archives.
Here's a review from AnandTech showing the 6600 GT
beating the FX 5950.
That was in 2004.
And according to Nvidia things are even better
than they seem.
They claim we are getting a 1.9 times performance per watt
improvement, 2.7 times the Shader performance,
1.7 times the Ray Tracing performance
and 2.7 times the Tensor core performance,
which in the real world translates to,
sorry, you'll have to give me a second here.
One metric, but ton.
Nvidia showed another Marbless,
fully Ray Traced graphics demo,
but while Turing rendered at 720p
(disgust)
Ampere managed to get 1440p with more sim complexity,
that's huge and while to be fair,
they had a little help from DLSS
and from a new learning algorithm that derives
missing color data from an incomplete image
to improve performance,
optimizations as a concept are nothing new
and the results here speak for themselves.
Nvidia also got a new memory signaling technique,
which carries four possible values per cycle
compared to only two,
effectively doubling the amount of memory bandwidth
while also increasing the frequency significantly.
So with the RTX 3080,
you're gonna get 10 gigs and it's gonna run 320 Watts
of rated power with the RTX 3070 getting 8 gigs
of a more traditional GDDR6 at a mere 220 Watts.
Put that in context, a 2080Ti was only 250 Watts.
(exclaims)
And Nvidia claims that that RTX 3070,
even though it consumes less power is faster
than the $1,200 2080Ti with the new RTX 3080
doubling the performance of the 2080,
and this is that 499 and 699 respectively.
There's nothing else I can say.
I'm absolutely mind blown.
They even light up.
But the question is, why?
Why after all these years of driving GPU prices up
has Nvidia decided to bestow upon us
these benevolent prices.
We've got a couple of theories.
One is that RTX 2080 and 2070 sales
were something of a disappointment.
I mean, it's not that they were terrible cards,
they just weren't a very compelling upgrade
for anyone who already owned a high end 1000 series.
So looking back then in whatever the past version
of a crystal ball is,
it seems like Nvidia priced Turing high
due to uncertain yields with TSMC,
and then hoped that RTX Ray Tracing
would be enough to carry it to the new price point.
So then now, because Samsung has worked with Nvidia
to make this custom eight nanometer process,
presumably it's more reliable,
which means that despite the cost per wafer,
almost certainly being higher as they tend to be
as we keep shrinking the process lower,
they're getting more usable chips out of them
working out to a much lower cost,
which is great for consumers.
I think it's fair to say that this is shaping up to be
an absolute unicorn of a GPU release.
Make sure you guys are subscribed by the way,
so you don't miss our review.
And there's also another angle to the pricing.
With launch date set for the end of Q3 and beginning of Q4,
it's pretty clear who Nvidia sees as the real competition
for 3000 series.
And it's not AMD, or at least not directly anyway.
It's Sony and Microsoft with the Xbox Series X
and PlayStation 5.
And by getting out ahead of those launches,
Nvidia seems to be trying to steal some of the thunder,
hopefully preventing gamers from being lured away from PC,
where Nvidia dominates over to consoles where they will,
I don't know, I guess there's Nintendo Switch.
One big hand here, is that just like the PS5,
the RTX 3000 GPUs have the ability to decompress data
directly from an SSD attached to the system
using direct storage.
This means load times can be much shorter
and the CPU doesn't need to get bogged down decompressing
the gigantic assets that make up today's game worlds.
Just like on the PlayStation 5 then,
developers who leverage this technology
can achieve more seamless loading
and Asset Streaming than was previously possible.
It also means that NVME and even PCI Express Gen 4
might actually become useful for gamers
where load times are notoriously CPU bound
in spite of the storage speed of modern systems.
Nvidia is also hyper-focused on content creation here,
looking to lure streamers and Machinima enthusiasts
with Nvidia Broadcast and Nvidia Omniverse Machinima.
Nvidia Broadcast includes a number of tools
to apply effects to the microphone input,
camera and speakers using Tensor cores
in what looks like a continuation of what RTX boy started.
So in addition to the noise removal that was possible before
we can now without a green screen,
automatically remove backgrounds and apply a blur effect
or backdrop and more with what looks like very convincing
effect compared to current solutions.
Nvidia Omniverse Machinima or NOM, I guess,
wash it down with a drink with our water bottle
from lttstore.com.
Okay.
NOM, lets you import game libraries and tools,
apply materials, physics simulations,
poses captured from webcams,
automatic facial animations from recorded audio
and more to create a wholly unique scene
for doing your own Machinima.
It's kind of like Ansel,
except that you get full control over the scene
instead of just the camera.
They provided a pretty great looking example
of a short clip of a siege
to give us an idea of what can be accomplished
and quite frankly,
I wouldn't be surprised if developers or even animators
end up drafting scenes this way, it's pretty cool.
So then RTX 3000 much less of a middle finger
directly to Radeon Technologies Group
and much more of a middle finger to the consoles.
Which isn't to say though,
that Nvidia hasn't done some extra credit work
against RTG as well.
Do you remember Radeon Anti-Lag
and how Nvidia originally claimed
that it was just a tweak that users
could already do to their drivers,
and then realized, oops, it's actually something more
and then they released Nvidia Ultra-Low Latency.
Well now, they're putting the cherry on top
with what they're calling Nvidia Reflex,
a driver path optimization technique
that should be available to all GTX 1000 and newer users
to reduce total system latency by up to roughly half.
Now the exact mechanisms that they're exploiting to do this
are currently unknown,
but presumably there's a cost of some sort somewhere
and you'll probably lose a bit of driver level control
in the process.
Finally, there's the one more thing.
RTX 3090 is the formal name of this generation's Titan.
But Jensen lovingly referred to it as the BF GPU.
It sucks back a rated 350 Watts,
hence the fancy new 12 pin power connector,
has over 10,000 CUDA cores and 24 gigs of GDDR6X memory
and comes in at 1499.
Meaning it's certainly priced like a Titan,
but unlike the last couple of generations of Titans,
it also appears to be specked like a Titan
and it might even be worth that obscene price tag.
They rolled out an LG 8K OLED TV to game on
and demonstrated 8K 60 FPS gameplay using DLSS and RTX.
Not only did the beefed up Tensor cores
appear to handle 8K upscaling without breaking a sweat,
the RTX 3090 can apparently even record 8K HDR gameplay
with Shadowplay.
In fact, there's bits and pieces in the whole presentation
that allude to upgrades across the board.
AV1 codex support for decode is now available
and NVENC is presumably no different
on the rest of the NPR cards, making 4K HDR Shadowplay
a thing now.
To go with it, it looks like we're finally getting HDMI 2.1
and probably more,
but we can figure all of that out in our review,
for now all that's left to say is,
"Boy is it ever good to see the effects
of more competition in the gaming hardware space?"
Even if it came from a bit of an unexpected direction.
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If you guys enjoyed this video
and you'd like a bit of a refresher
on what a bad GPU launch looks like,
maybe go check out our review of the RTX 2080.
It seems like Nvidia has learned a thing or two since then.
(upbeat electric music)
Or maybe check out our 8K gaming video.
That was terrible.
That's gonna be way better now.