NVIDIA RTX 3070, 3080, 3090

NVIDIA RTX 30 series

What is a graphics card?

Graphics cards, commonly known as video cards are hardware electronic devices that render high quality images. It is widely used for gamming, video editing and also in development of artificial intelligence, AI.

There are two types of graphics, one is integrated and another is discrete. Integrated graphic is built into motherboard without which it would be impossible to experience that user-friendly interface on computers that we are enjoying now.

Discrete on the other hand is an external video card, a hardware connected to the motherboard to enhance the graphic experience. Now these are manufactured by two most famous companies

Nvidia and AMD.

 Nvidia is an American multinational company that are widely known for its remarkable GPUs (graphics processing units) chipsets, basically graphics card. GPUs are not to be confused with CPUs regardless for their sole purpose which is computing or calculation. One is responsible for handling only graphics related calculations i.e. rendering high quality images, the GPUs, and another is to handle wide-range of tasks from running OS to games.

AMD is also an American  multinational company that manufactures processors (CPU) as well as video cards (GPU).

Nvidia has three main graphics card series, GTX , RTX, TITAN. GTX stands for  Geforce eXtreme  is the high end graphics card, and RTX series is successor of gtx  series with real time ray tracing technology, providing better quality picture and lighting.

The architecture used currently in gtx is Pascal microarchitecture in the 10 series and Turing microarchitecture in the RTX 20 and GTX16 series.

 RTX series has turing microarchitecture while the Titan series has volta microarchitecture. 

RTX 30 series was launched recently on September 1^st 2020, is the latest model available in the market, with considerably affordable price at Rs 51,000 INR ( $499  USD) with respect to it’s predecessor the rtx 20 series which is around Rs 73,390  INR ($999  USD) and even higher.

Moving onto it’s features, we have the base model RTX 3070, has a VRAM of 8GB GDDR6,

With 5,888 CUDA cores. The higher model RTX 3080 has a VRAM of 10GB GDDR6X with 8,704 CUDA cores, and the top model RTX 3090 with VRAM 24 GDDR6X and 10,496 CUDA cores which will be available in the market from 24^th September onwards with a price tag of Rs152,000 INR. The base model starts at Rs 51,000 INR as mentioned earlier.

In order to understand what makes the rtx exceptional is the number of CUDA cores, 2^nd gen ray tracing cores, faster 3^rd gen Tensor cores, powered by it’s latest 2^nd gen architecture, Ampere microarchitecture.

Now what are CUDA cores?

CUDA cores stands for “Compute Unified Device Architecture” cores are parallel processors responsible for processing every single data that is fed into and out of the GPU, hence making 4K to 8K gaming smooth with high frame rates. To be precise CUDA cores are responsible for high end graphic calculations, which includes rendering scenery, drawing game characters, resolving complex shading and lighting in a game. More CUDA cores means better performance in gaming, video editing, streaming etc.