NVIDIA launched its 30-series GPUs last 2020 amidst the challenges facing chip manufacturers. The tech company has always been expected to release improved versions of its GPUs as the years go by.
As the third year of the 30-series life cycle begins, the company announces two new additions to the series, the new budget RTX 3050 GPU and the new flagship RTX 3090 Ti GPU during its CES 2022 presentation.
RTX 3050 “The Budget Option”
The 50-class of GPUs has been introduced a decade ago as an offering to gamers who are looking for an affordable video card that has the latest architecture and great performance.
Currently, the top 3 GPUs on Steam are GTX 50-class cards including the GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, and the more modern GTX 1650. But as the production value of games increases the need for more powerful cards follows.
Today, NVIDIA has announced its new budget GPU the RTX 3050 which will bring the performance and efficiency of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture to more gamers.
The card is equipped with 2nd generation RT Cores for ray tracing and 3rd gen Tensor Cores for DLSS and AI. This is the first time ray tracing will be available on a 50-class GPU at over 60 frames per second (FPS). Additionally, it also comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
Furthermore, the RTX 3050 comes with other features that enhance your gaming experiences. These include NVIDIA Reflex to minimize your system latency in games, the NVIDIA Broadcast app for AI-powered voice and video, NVIDIA encoder for streaming games, NVIDIA studio to improve and enhance creative apps, NVIDIA’s reliable Game Ready Drivers and studio drivers.
The RTX 3050 Specs are as follows:
- 9 Shader-TFLOPS
- 18RT-TFLOPS
- 73 tensor-TFLOPS
- 8GB GDDR6 memory
Pricing starts at USD 249 and will be available on January 27. However, we expect the local price to be in the PHP 20,000 – PHP 25,000 range given the mining hype and chip shortage.
RTX 3090 Ti “The New Flagship”
During the NVIDIA CES 2022 presentation, the company teased its new flagship card the RTX 3090 Ti. It is a step up from the current flagship the RTX 3090.
Same as the 3090, the 3090 Ti will have 24GB of GDDR6X memory but will run at 21Gbit/s rather than the 19.5 Gbit/s of the current flagship. It is also reported that the new card is able to calculate 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops, and 320 tensors (AI) teraflops which is an improvement on the 35.6 shader teraflops, 69.5 RT teraflops, and 285 tensor teraflops of its predecessor.
These features of the new flagship represent a 12.5-ish % increase in performance over the current flagship making it the most powerful gaming card ever released. We will know how NVIDIA has achieved this when they release the full specs of the new flagship GPU.
In addition, the current flagship 3090 has 82 GA102 streaming processors activated out of the total 84, so it is speculated the 3090Ti might use all 84 streaming processors.
The new GPU may also have a slightly higher memory clock, it is suggested that it might be around 1,840MHz on the 3090Ti as opposed to the 1,695MHz on the 3090 in order to reach the 40-teraflop figure NVIDIA teased.
NVIDIA said that more details will come later this month that may include detailed specs of the new flagship and its pricing.
Source 1, 2 | Featured image
Started his freelancing adventure in 2018 and began doing freelance Audio Engineering work and then started freelance writing a few years later.
Currently he writes for Gadget Pilipinas and Grit.PH.
He is also a musician, foody, gamer, and PC enthusiast.
