The GeForce RTX 3090, a flagship graphics card for gamers, creators, and other demanding users that NVIDIA introduced as part of its Ampere generation of GPUs in 2020, will be celebrating its fourth birthday this month, having been released to retailers on September 24 for $1,499, per sources that include NVIDIA’s original GeForce RTX 30 Series announcement. The graphics card, which NVIDIA referred to as a BFGPU (i.e., “Big Ferocious GPU”), was advertised as having a level of performance powerful enough to deliver a 60 FPS experience in 8K resolution across what green team said was “many top games.”
NVIDIA said of the GeForce RTX 3090 ahead of its launch in September 2020:
- “It features 10,496 CUDA cores. It’s packed with 24GB of cutting-edge GDDR6X memory. It’s the world’s fastest graphics card — much faster than the previous generation TITAN RTX.”
- “Creators using the GeForce RTX 3090 will find that they can work with datasets that are more than twice as large as those that will fit into the memory of the GeForce RTX 3080.”
- “For gamers pushing the limits, the GeForce RTX 3090 is also the first GPU that lets you connect, play, capture, and watch in 8K HDR. That’s an insane 4x the pixels of 4K and 16x the pixels of 1080p.”
- “For 4K gaming, the GeForce RTX 3090 is about 10-15% faster on average than the GeForce RTX 3080, and up to 50% faster than the TITAN RTX.”
The GeForce RTX 30 Series launch included:
| GeForce RTX 3090 | GeForce RTX 3080 | GeForce RTX 3070 | |
| CUDA Cores | 10,496 | 8,704 | 5,888 |
| VRAM | 24 GB GDDR6X | 10 GB GDDR6X | 8 GB GDDR6 |
| Prices Starting At | $1499 | $699 | $499 |
| Release Date | September 24 | September 17 | Available October |
A copy of the 40-minute launch event for the series, including a look at NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s kitchen:
NVIDIA on the GeForce RTX 30 Series:
GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs also feature several world firsts: they’re the first gaming-class graphics cards with up to 24GB of new, blazing-fast GDDR6X VRAM; they’re the first GPUs with HDMI 2.1, for 4K high refresh rate and 8K gaming; they’re the first discrete GPUs with support for the AV1 codec, enabling you to watch high-resolution streams using significantly less bandwidth; and our Founders Edition cards are the first with innovative dual axial flow through cooling solutions.