The excitement for Nvidia's new RTX 3000 series has been building up over the last few months, and more so over the last few days, where there have been a number of leaks. Now, the time of reckoning is approaching, as Nvidia's countdown has dropped down to mere hours.
We're expecting Nvidia to unveil two graphics cards at this event: the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3080, with both cards seeing retail availability this month. We're hoping that Nvidia will also announce the RTX 3070, though that card is only expected to formally launch in October.
So far, the rumors about the cards are lavish. The RTX 3090 is seen as the halo 'dream' card to have, with rumors pointing to a bedazzling 5248 CUDA cores linked to a mind-boggling 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. While the RTX 3090 will therefore help Nvidia keep its king of the hill status, it's also reported to cost a king's leg, and then some.
The RTX 3080 will be more approachable with a reported 4352 CUDA cores and 10 GB of GDDR6X memory, though we reckon the sweet spot will be the RTX 3070 that's coming in October, much like the RTX 2070 made the most sense from a cost vs. performance perspective. Exact specifications for the RTX 3070 aren't available yet as there hasn't been a reliable leak for that card, yet.
Other than that, the RTX 3000 series are expected to add PCI-Express 4.0 support, and with AMD currently being the only player to offer PCI-Express 4.0 support, we're expecting interesting results when testing the RTX 3000 series .
Nvidia's Ampere GPUs are also expected to be produced on the 7nm fabrication process, and a new 12-pin power connector is rumored for the Founders Edition cards along with a wild new cooler design.
For more reading material during this exciting wait, check out our everything we know summary of the Ampere GPUs.