Nvidia launches GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti graphics cards

Nvidia launched its new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti graphics cards at the virtual Computex 2021 event in Taiwan.

Jeff Fisher, the senior vice president of Nvidia’s GeForce business, announced the new graphics cards and their graphics processing units (GPUs) during a Computex talk. He showed a mod of Microsoft Flight Simulator that highlighted Taipei, where the event usually takes place.

The 3080 Ti GPU is the flagship GPU for games, and it’s based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture with second-generation RT cores and third-generation Tensor cores.

“The 80 Ti class of GPUs represents the best of our gaming lineup,” Fisher said.

Fisher also showed off some new laptops using RTX from HP, Acer, and Alienware. Fisher said the RTX 3080 Ti is 1.5 times faster than its predecessor and tears through the latest games with all the settings cranked up. And the RTX 3070 Ti is 1.5 times faster than a 2070 Super, thanks to more cores and 12GBs of fast GDDR6X memory. It has 34 shader teraflops, 67 RT teraflops, and 273 Tensor teraflops.

GeForce RTX 3080 Ti availability will begin June 3, starting at $1,200, and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti availability begins June 10, starting at $600.

DLSS and RTX

Above: Nvidia’s RTX is used in more than 130 games.

Image Credit: Nvidia

Nvidia launched its RTX graphics processing units (GPUs) two years ago and now more than 130 titles now support Nvidia’s RTX raytracing technologies. Nvidia’s Reflix is now used in 12 of the top 15 competitive shooter games. And more than 60 of the RTX games support Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses AI to boost frame rates and automatically upscale images in a 3D scene to fit a user’s display settings.

Nvidia DLSS increases performance by up to two times while maintaining crisp, clear image quality. The gaming franchises that use DLSS to deliver a new level of graphics includes Battlefield, Call of Duty, Control, Crysis, Cyberpunk, Death Stranding, Doom, Final Fantasy, Fortnite, Marvel Avengers, Metro, Minecraft, Monster Hunter, Outriders, Red Dead Redemption, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Tomb Raider, War Thunder, Watch Dogs, and Wolfenstein. Games highlighted by Nvidia in its Computex talk include The Ascent, Doom Eternal, Dying: 1983, Icarus, Lego Builder’s
Journey, and The Persistence.

Laptops using Nvidia’s RTX and Max-Q technologies now start at $800.

Fisher noted some big gaming milestones. He said Minecraft’s open world is estimated to have grown to 4 billion square kilometers, or eight times the surface of the planet. Valve just announced that 2021 Dota championship will feature a $40 million prize pool. Roblox had 42 million daily active users in the first quarter, up 80% year over year. And there are 45 million professional and freelance creators fueling an explosion in digital content.

“Our laptops have accelerated over 25 billion hours of content creation, thanks to all of our partners who are just as excited as we are about reinventing this market and are joining us in the next major leap forward,” Fisher said.

Matt Wuebbling, the vice president of global GeForce marketing at Nvidia, said in a press briefing that the semiconductor shortage is still affecting Nvidia, and that you can expect see supply tightness, as Nvidia announced during its recent earnings call. He said Nvidia expects to have good availability on the launch dates.

“You see the pace of innovation and gaming continues with new games, new everything,” Wuebbling said. “We aim to deliver that, regardless of the environment.”