Ray-tracing is a bit of a buzzword at the moment and for good reason. For those of you who don’t know, ray-tracing technology is an evolving form of hyper-advanced lighting seen in digitally rendered environments. It’s been used by animated movies for ages now but it’s taken a while to burst into the video game industry, largely because it’s more expensive to design around and it requires some real specialised technology to actually run it. Yet that hasn’t stopped Nvidia, one of the more notable producers of GPUs for decades now, from implementing the tech in their graphics cards. Yet ray-tracing technology has grown monumentally since Nvidia first tried to it commercially available and they’re only doubling down on its new range of RTX cards.
Unveiled last night, Nvidia shed light on the RTX 3000 range of graphics cards and despite their gigantic size and gorgeous aesthetic, they’re not as expensive as you might think. Featuring Nvidia’s new Ampere tech, the RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 are designed in such a way that advanced ray-tracing tech has never been more accessible.
Now, we could get into all the specs and hardware details but you and I both know that you’re not interested in the nitty-gritty. All you want to know is how much better these cards are compared the previous RTX 2000 range. Nvidia has promised that the 3000 range will pump out twice the power of the high-end RTX 2080 card; the RTX 3080 will include 10GB of GDDR6X memory and an updated thermal design to ensure the card doesn’t melt when you’re playing Cyberpunk 2077 with that advanced lighting technology.
Yet the best part about these new GPUs? They are way cheaper than you’re expecting them to be. The RTX 3070, available in October, will be $499 (R8 392,33 at the time of writing) while the RTX 3080 will be $699 (R11 755,99) and will launch on 17 September. Lastly, and definitely most expensively, the RTX 3090 will cost $1,500 which is just over a whopping R25,000. Look, that thing is capable of pushing out 8K resolutions which is an absurd number that the human eye can hardly recognise so why would you even bother?
To show off to your friends, that’s why.
(Source: The Verge)
