Nvidia 3000 series - your thoughts and did you get one ?

[Undertoker]

Hi guys
just wanted to gauge others feelings re these cards.
Im a 2080ti owner, i always go to Asus ROG as they quality is just so good for my entrie builds.
The present card i have is the STrix OC edition and i was lucky as it is a golden sample and clocks at over 1800mhz boosting to 2100+ and 15600 on the memory and sits at about 72deg C maximum whilst it does it.
I DID repaste the card with kryonaught and it made a huge difference to running temps - about 6-8 degrees, it must be crap the factory paste Asus use tbh

Anyway ive been getting itchy feet looking at the new gen cards as all enthusiats do and decided to plump for a 3090, Asus Strix OC again and my son is going to have my 2080ti in his machine and cuffed he is as well.
Dont get me wrong the 3090 isnt a value card or a good sensible buy, but for me the money isnt a concern as i am very comfortable and my PC is my only vice in honesty.
I couldnt get one and sadly have a preoder that will probably appear in october now (much to my lads annoyance)

A few things puzzle me about this Ampere release
Im puzzled as to why Jensen called the 3080 10GB his "flagship card" and i forsee a 20GB version being released soon, pehaps called the Ti or Super and i wonder if Jenson will say that is then the new "flagship" card. ultimately for me the 3090 is the flagship and a direct comparsion to the 2080ti despite the crap jenson talks
Also why dont they be honest with people on release day as to what is coming?
Say this as clearly a lot of other models are on the way from nvidia

Why does Nvidia always punish its best cutomers - the early adopters first by doing this a releasing better cards it didnt mention on release day a short while after their biggest fans have made a purchase?
Why cant they simply announce their full line up on release day, not actually stock them necesserily but let people know they are coming and then people could target the card they wanted and if needs be wait for it, but i forsee a lot of 10GB 3080 owners being bloody annoyed and upset when the 20GB models appear as they surely will, in very much the same way as they screwed 2080 owners by releasing a 2080 super agian not that long after release

Why upset your best customers ? It seems daft to me.

Also i do wonder just how good Navi 21 is going to be, to me AMD do have the right approach ethic i.e. 50% more per watt as a target, that to me sounds good, better then 400W+ but i do not think the performance will be there sadly and part of me does want this preorder to come in late october so i can take a look at them.
My only concern with AMD is the bloody drivers and software, which are usually crap tbh. But i do think that they will come up with a card that sits just below the 3080 but using a lot less power and a bit chepaer, which people will go for i guess.

I also thinkl that Nvidia could well be releasign a driver soon that will boost their cards significantly - at least i hope so, especially for the 3090.
I have seen a few runours that this is the case and the idea is its a response to an AMD card to boost the 3000 series cards by a significant margin - i guess we will see

What do others think about these cards and what do you think AMd will come up with ?

 

[Brian_B]

Why does Nvidia always punish its best cutomers

Same reason Apple does - because they always come back for more.

 

[MadMummy76]

I think the nv marketing department's left hand doesn't know what the right hand does.

To me it's clear as day that the 3090 is a workstation workhorse, not a gaming card. That's why they call the 3080 their flagship, because it is the gaming flagship. The 3090 is a Titan RTX replacement. And the underwhelming gaming benchmarks confirm that. It barely beats the 3080 in most games

Some idiots in marketing got carried away when they saw that the 3090 could run Doom Eternal at acceptable framerate in 8K, and decided let's call this a 8K gaming card. It's not, because most games won't run at 8K on it. The 3090 is as much a 8K gaming card as the 980 was a 4K gaming card.

If I was concerned with gaming only I'D not buy the 3090, even if the money is burning a hole in my pocket. I'd rather just get a 3080, and when the 3080Ti / Super whatever comes out just jump on that.

 

[nEo717]

For the first time in 5+ new gen NVIDIA cards launching I've taken a pass (other than passed on Titan Volta) -- had (2) 3090's on order and secured, cancelled it before they shipped -- With talk of possible capacitor troubles, decided not to pay nearly $1,800.00 ea to deal with any possible problems and drama -- Unless AMD next gen Navi sucks (for me that means no card to at least match the 3080), decided to wait and go AMD in top 2 systems at least for now...

 

[Niner51]

Waiting on a step up program purchase for a 3080 through EVGA. Not sure when or if it will happen though given the demands on these cards, and now the capacitor issue.

 

[MacLeod]

Really wanted a 3080, had cash in hand but now am over it and think I'll wait a while and upgrade some other things instead. However I do really want a 3080 and if I ever run across one, primarily a Founder's Edition, I'll probably throw everything I just said out the window and buy it. It is a pretty awesome card.

 

[Tyrchlis]

Apologies for first post being SUPER long! TL : DR version - I love mah RTX 3090!!!!

My first post here. I snagged a PNY RTX 3090 on launch day straight from PNY direct, in fact they called me to take my order over the phone due to my being on an internal list of users who had problems with the site during purchases previously, they gave us first dibs to the -2- 3090's that were in stock on launch day for PNY direct... PNY had sent out most of it's existing stock to Newegg, Amazon, and Best Buy according to PNY's sales manager Lisette. I was the first person she called on the list, and got my choice of the PPB or MPB model, and already knew I wanted the PPB version.

The card I ended up with is the PNY RTX 3090 24Gb XLR8 Gaming Epic-X (VCG309024TFXPPB version). The card was 1499.99, PNY did not charge me tax and 2nd day shipping was free. I literally paid exactly 1499.99 shipped. Because launch day was Thursday, and the card did not ship till Friday, I did not receive the card until the following Tuesday, and it arrived in the morning (fortunately). So the first day of ownership was a full proper day of getting to enjoy it and test it out in various benchmarks and ray tracing demos, as well as setting up the games I have with DLSS and ray tracing to start using it.

My experience one month into ownership:

I upgraded from a Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Ti to the 3090. And it has been purely the best case scenario overall for my situation, which is a nearly 4 year old PC running an overclocked i7 7700K, 32Gb DDR4 3200mhz, M.2 512Gb Samsung 960 Pro system drive, 6Tb Toshiba X300 HDD, Corsair HX850i Platinum PSU and a Viewsonic XG2703-GS 1440p@165hz Gsync monitor.

My use case situation is that I want high refresh rate 1440p WITH ray tracing effects enabled at maximum, and nothing but Quality mode DLSS on everything I do. Not even 3090 is capable of outputting 165hz for 4K, and no such monitors exist anyway that don't cost thousands of dollars more than I have. 165hz Gsync with ray tracing @1440p is a big ask even for 3090, and it delivers beautifully well.

I have seen more than enough data now to know for a fact that ray tracing itself is the "eater of performance" no matter WHAT GPU you throw at it. And I want ray tracing. And I want it fast. 165hz kinda fast. Not getting that at 4K overall unless you have tricked out SLI 3090's with custom created profiles. Most AAA games with ray tracing support are lucky to get over 100fps at 4K if maxed out quality. Getting to 165 @4K ain't happening with maxed RT. Not now, and not at all this generation. However, nailing 165 constantly at 1440p is perfectly doable for a single 3090 to run ray tracing nirvana, pure highest quality settings that a game can dish out. Exactly my target.

Games like Watch Dogs Legion and upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 really bear out my logic on this. For maximized ray tracing AND highest quality DLSS settings, forget 4K@ +120fps. Not happening. Not on a single 3090, 6900XT, or anything else for the next 2 or more years.

So, for MY needs, this GPU is just nailing it. I do have a CPU and PCIe bottleneck, and in games that do not support ray tracing to bog down performance and mask that CPU bottleneck, I can measure the CPU/PCIe bottleneck as an average 10% below most reviews for RTX 3090 Founders Edition. Most of those reviews use processors like 10900K or 3950X to benchmark and minimize bottlenecks.

In this scenario, the RTX 3090 is providing roughly double the performance of the card it replaced in my system, the aforementioned GTX 1080 Ti. Newer games and benchmarks can often go over double the performance, but older ones tend to show less than double. The lighter the graphics load due to age of game/benchmark, the less difference between 1080 Ti and 3090 because the onus becomes system performance, not GPU.

Watching Rx 6900XT coming up, I feel even more justified in my purchase as my suspicion of first generation ray tracing woes for Big Navi is looking pretty spot on. I bought into this generation at ALL for ray tracing, the GTX 1080 Ti was still playing games without ray tracing JUST fine. I'll be damned if I get ripped on the entire reason I am even jumping in on this generation at all. Gimme ray tracing goodies! NAOW! And that is exactly what RTX 3090 serves up for my needs exactly, ray tracing goodies!

 

[Tyrchlis]

Just as an added point to the above, I do quite a bit more than just game, I am also a modder who can literally show the difference between quality levels of my work due to GPU performance limitations in a very clear example. In the middle of building my Legio Titanicus mod, texturing the two main Titans shows clearly the upgrade that happened in the middle of that work (several years back, happened during the upgrade to 1080 Ti from a GTX 680).

The amount of texturing I was able to accomplish on the Imperiator Titan far outshined the prior completed Warlord Titan almost at a generational leap visibly. And that was just the uplift from 2Gb to 11Gb of vram (not that anything on the Imperiator came close to 11Gb, but it certainly stuffed 2Gb full and dropped to a crawl). Hell, I haven't even come up with a use case for 24Gb yet, but I'm already on the hunt! And it's a FUN quest!

Forgive the old school graphics in this screenshot, it's simply an example of how vram increase helped me tremendously. In this screenshot, the lower right corner largish Titan is the Warlord I finished up while still having a GTX 680, but the Imperiator (center, largest) was finished post-upgrade. I was able to do a LOT more in 3Dsmax without painful waits. (note - the smaller two titans with visible shields are not my work, they are from Ultimate Apocalypse mod, the host mod my Legio Titanicus mod required to run. My mod only consisted of Imperiator, Warlord, and Cavalier Titans).

Improvement of 2Gb GPU to an 11Gb GPU made this possible without insane waiting times while dealing with the most time consuming part of modding I HATE the most... texturing.

Edit - Credit where it's due, I did not create the original meshes for either Warlord or Imperiator. They were abandonware on an old forum for Dawn of War that I picked up, finished out texturing and rigging both, reimported back to DoW and then coded their animation sequences, upgrade paths, and functional details (physics, loadouts, reacts, sounds, etc.) It was a 3 year long project to make the Imperiator and Warlord walk, talk, and kill tiny things. I did not make the original meshes though, but credited the mesh author on moddb where I posted Legio Titanicus originally before Ultimate Apocalypse team absorbed my mod (I willingly turned over further development and updating to them as long as they remembered to credit that original Russian guy who made the meshes that made my work possible.)