The new RTX 3080 from Nvidia is definitely a reason to change my graphics card

The new graphics cards RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 from Nvidia have now been officially announced. For our editor Patrick Freese, the RTX 3080 is now a reason to upgrade his gaming PC.

What’s new: In a major livestream on September 1st, Nvidia officially presented the new RTX 3000 series with Ampere architecture. A wave of new graphics cards is coming to the market soon and could make gamers’ hearts race. Because what Nvidia promises sounds like a huge performance jump.

Initially, three models were presented in the form of Founders Editions. These are (via nvidia.com):

• The Geforce RTX 3070 – You will get it starting in October with a recommended retail price (RRP) of €499
• The Geforce RTX 3080 – You will get it starting September 17th with an RRP of €699
• The Geforce RTX 3090 – You will get it starting September 24th with an RRP of €1,499

For me, what Nvidia revealed about the new graphics cards for 2020 is definitely a reason to upgrade.

Who is writing here? I, Patrick from MeinMMO, have been regularly building gaming PCs for myself, my family, and my friends for over 16 years. The assembly of individual components is the focus, and I always pay attention to price and performance. If an upgrade isn’t worth it, I won’t recommend it. But the new 3000 series graphics cards from Nvidia sound really exciting to me.

How good will the RTX 3080 be?

What Nvidia says: According to the manufacturer, the RTX 3080 should be simply twice as fast as the RTX 2080 of the last generation. The cheaper RTX 3070 is even faster than the last flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti.

The performance difference that is coming with the new cards is enormous. As a hardware enthusiast, I rubbed my hands together after this presentation.

Let’s take a rough look at the specifications of the new RTX 3000 GPUs.

In the area of ray tracing, the new generation is advancing. The ray tracing and tensor cores are said to be, just like the normal shaders, significantly improved. The shader and tensor cores are 2.7 times faster compared to the first RTX generation. The ray tracing cores are at least 1.7 times faster than the first RTX gen. So if you care about games with ray tracing, you can certainly benefit significantly here according to Nvidia’s data.

The RTX 3080 is already on my wish list

That’s why I will upgrade: At the beginning of 2017, I bought my gaming computer, as it stands here at my desk, with a GTX 1080. Well, there were small upgrades like more RAM and a larger SSD in between, but I didn’t change my graphics card, although I was eyeing the RTX 2000 series.

Although the RTX2000 cards were already better than mine, the upgrade was too poorly priced for me. I saw no justification in buying a new graphics card for so much money. The performance jump was simply too small for me.

Now Nvidia is launching new graphics cards with the RTX 3000 series and pricing them at a relatively low price. And they are also significantly better than the cards of the 2000 series. As GameStar reports, used RTX 2080 Ti are now cheaper than ever after the Ampere presentation.

This price/performance ratio is a challenge that the competition at AMD will have a hard time dealing with.

The enormous performance leap of the new models, which is also delivered by the RTX 3080, along with this competitive price is a strong argument for me to finally retire my old 1080 and treat myself to the 3080 this year. But first, I will wait for a few tests.

What about you? Were the new models from Nvidia convincing for you and how did you like the presentation?