This has been a very busy week for tech. Earlier, AMD launched its newest graphics cards, the RX 6000 series. The cards received universal praise for being cheaper than Nvidia‘s alternatives, and also faster. Radeon shook the whole gaming industry with their newest cards, which even offer a similar experience to Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0. All in all, you would be very hard-pressed to find fault in Radeon’s newest products. This may be why Nvidia plans to unveil a secret weapon on the 17th of November.
Nvidia’s pride suffered a blow earlier on in the year when the newest generation of consoles decided to go Team AMD. While in the past, consoles like the Nintendo Switch were only made possible thanks to Nvidia, that may no longer be the case. Of course, the PC side of things is still dominated by the tech giant, but the damage was done. AMD is fast gaining ground that Nvidia is losing. This is probably why we see new graphic cards announced so soon after the Radeon RX 6000 series laid Nvidia’s RTX 3000 line to rest.
Rival brand AMD pulled the rug out from under Nvidia’s feet
Both Radeon and Nvidia released ground-breaking products this year. The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and the RTX 3090 represent the highest specs money can buy. These cards are trailblazers, paving the way towards 8K gaming at high refresh rates. But the Nvidia lineup has a little hole in its armor: its price. Starting at around $1,500 USD, it isn’t cheap. Some will buy it, like Bitcoin miners. But beyond these few cases, that asking price is a little too much to ask for.
If Nvidia was the only way to get to those lofty benchmark scores, we’d just shrug, and ask for monthly payment options. But then came AMD to strike down the Goliath that is the RTX 3090. AMD’s RX 6900 XT costs just shy of $999 USD. It’s not even a question as to which is more sensible to purchase.
Nvidia must have seen the masses getting rowdy, so to placate the crowd, they announced a new series of cards. Well, they haven’t announced it, more like leaked it in a time and place that served to draw attention away from the competition.
Nvidia cut no corners with this machine
Made with 8-nanometer Samsung cores, and featuring 4864 of them, the new card is a force to be reckoned with. There are 152 texture mapping units, 80 ROPs and 152 tensor cores to boost machine learning. It also comes packed with 38 raytracing cores, which come in clutch for DLSS 2.0 alongside the tensor cores. The card supports DirectX12, which means it’ll run modern games easily.
The new GA104 GPU has more than 17,400 million transistors, which help give it a base clock speed of 1410 MHz, capable of going to 1665 MHz. It sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps. That figure alone tells of the power the unit carries, but not the efficiency. The TBP power usage is 180W, just a 5W increase over the RTX 2070. At most, the figure is rated to go up to 200W, which isn’t too much.
Nvidia to announce the RTX 3060Ti by mid-November
The newest graphics card serves as a front line defense against Radeon’s RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. The cheapest of AMD’s line also somehow does much better than a card costing $50 US dollars more. This means Nvidia had to come up with an emergency plan, if only to prevent loyal customers from changing sides.
The new RTX 3060 Ti puts the performance of the RTX 2080 cards to shame. The name implies we can expect the card to be priced around or less than the RTX 3070, so maybe in the $450 range. All in all, this card might bring about the end of AMD’s rampage. We’ll keep you updated as more news is announced.