With much anticipation and more than a few leaks, NVIDIA this morning is announcing the next generation of video cards, the GeForce RTX 30 series. Based upon the gaming and graphics variant of NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture and built on an optimized version of Samsung’s 8nm process, NVIDIA is touting the new cards as delivering some of their greatest gains ever in gaming performance. All the while, the latest generation of GeForce will also be coming with some new features to further set the cards apart from and ahead of NVIDIA’s Turing-based RTX 20 series.
[…]The first card out the door will be the GeForce RTX 3080. With NVIDIA touting upwards of 2x the performance of the RTX 2080, this card will go on sale on September 17th for $700. That will be followed up a week later by the even more powerful GeFoce RTX 3090, which hits the shelves September 24th for $1500. Finally, the RTX 3070, which is being positioned as more of a traditional sweet spot card, will arrive next month at $499.
My GTX 1070 is still going strong, and I found the RTX 20xx range far too overpriced for the performance increase they delivered. At $499, though, the RTX 3070 looks like a pretty good deal, but it wouldn’t be the first time supplies will be low, and thus, prices will skyrocket.
The 2080 TI was definitely expensive, but there was a point when they first launched you could get them at the right price, before they skyrocketed from demand. And at that point, it wasn’t an outrageous amount to pay for the performance, if you could afford it.
But the price / performance of the 3080 looks pretty special, providing there is sufficient supply to stop the prices exploding.
Looks promising, but … i’m hoping this will just make AMD cards cheaper, since i really don’t like nvidia’s attitude towards open source as a whole.
I’m blob free, aside from firmware alas, but there isn’t much that can be done about that nowadays. I really don’t miss the days of dealing with nvidia’s drivers on linux.
p13,
I agree. We need more competition. Improvements from AMD would be most welcome. Also everyone’s been pretty sour about intel discrete GPUs but I’ll wait until we actually see performance data. I don’t know what market they’re targeting yet either, but regardless more competition is something we’ve needed for a while.
Yeah I hear that. It’s too bad that AMD’s cards weren’t competitive performance-wise when I built my computer. Nvidia drivers work well when they work. The newest drivers from nvidia are usually the best, but linux updates can be fragile and sometimes after an update I get stuck in VGA mode, ugh! On the one hand you’ve got linux devs refusing stable APIs, and on the other you’ve got manufacturers refusing to open source & upstream drivers. Together, these two facts lead to breakages.
I… don’t understand. You’re all complaining about the lack of competition in the GPU field, that Nvidia and AMD should drop their pants and show their balls openly so that you, as an open source advocate, could take notes, copy schematics, refactor firmwares, based on their investments and R&D. But…
http://miaowgpu.org/
https://github.com/MagerValp/fifogfx
https://hackaday.com/2012/06/05/open-source-graphics-card/
Now where are those armies of open source advocates ready to contribute their efforts to a noble cause? Btw…
https://gpuopen.com/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/08/08/nvidia-gpu-hardware-documentation-open-source-linux-github-but-theres-a-catch/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-K2020-Low-End-Card
We are talking about drivers …
“Oh hey i’d like documentation about how to talk to this hardware” is not the same as “I would like all of your IP”.
I … don’t understand your objection.
Intel and AMD are both doing a very good job in this regard. Nvidia isn’t.
The result is that the open source amdgpu driver performs as well, or better than the binary ones.
Haven’t you followed the Oracle/Google Java API debacle? Do you really want to see the world burn over the “documentation about how to talk to this hardware” ? I’m clearly seeing through this…
Kochise,
Not for nothing, but customers including myself are literally paying nvidia for the hardware as well as the drivers. It is inaccurate to portray paying customers as having contributed nothing. I’ll concede that as linux users, we only represent a fraction of the market and they may not care too much about loosing us, however p13. is right that nvidia’s approach to open source leaves customers like myself somewhat disappointed. In any case, they get away with it due to the lack of competition, especially high end.
Linux may have a tiny proportion of the gaming market, but share is slowly growing.
Modern GPUs are also used for general purpose processing, and Linux has a significantly higher share of this market.
Yeah, AMD open source drivers are cool and all, but at the end of the day GPGPU has been a thing for over.a decade, and NVIDIA owns that market… a lot of which runs on Linux.
It’s a pity, AMD has done some cool stuff lately. But their software “strategy” is just abysmal..They are conceding so much of the high end and high margin tiers of the CPU and GPU markets,
bert64,
GPGPUs are actually my principal interest in high end GPUs for linux. Alas, the open source situation is even worse for GPGPU tasks since the nouveau drivers are inadequate and it seems unlikely nvidia wants to help change that. More competition would help put the pressure on though. But even that is going to be tough because nvidia has a monopoly on cuda, which has become the defacto industry standard and it’s all proprietary.
Probably, but if Nvidia is not willing to support Linux in any good way (see Linus’ finger salute) you still can go to the competition.
As for an open source alternative ? Guess what…
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwODY
“- Only seven people ever tried to order one of the hundreds of thousands of people that visited the web-site. They needed at least 100 orders for a single bath order..”
“- There were not enough skilled people that knew about hardware design to design a truly open graphics card.”
Seems like open source without the support of big corporation (Google/Firefox, Sun/OpenOffice, …) and their money/engineers is bound to fail.
Hence, to have access to TMSC and provide them a nice VHDL, you’d better wake up early in the morning.
Until then, sure, Nvidia or AMD/ATI are the only viable hope. Provided their plan magically coincides with yours.
Kochise,
Sure, that’s an easy generalization. But it’s tougher when nvidia holds the dominant position in the market, which is why I keep saying that we need more competition particularly at the high end.
I’m very aware of the challenges faced by new players who have virtually no funding and virtually no market share. On the software side of things, small teams can accomplish great feats. However when it comes to cutting edge hardware, you pretty much need to be billionaire-funded to play the game.
It’s similar to the corporate space race, The set of people who have the necessary skills is much greater than the set of people who have the necessary economic resources; a successful venture requires the intersection of these sets.
A highly parallel vector processing unit wouldn’t be particularly difficult to design and it’s technically far simpler than superscalar CPUs with complex out of order pipelines. A grad student could realistically design one, however cost effective large scale fabrication is a different story. Even if a product did somehow make it to market, an even bigger challenge would be getting enough buyers to reach critical mass due to the notorious chicken and egg problem.
I think we can agree that new competition after markets have consolidated is virtually impossible without the backing of a huge corporation, and even then it isn’t assured.
You left out intel. While they’ve had missteps, they have the potential to shake up the GPU market. Technically apple might have the potential to as well, although I have no confidence that they would be interested in competing on openness.
“A highly parallel vector processing unit wouldn’t be particularly difficult to design and it’s technically far simpler than superscalar CPUs with complex out of order pipelines.”
Adapteva Epiphany Parallella boards? Went belly up too. Founder created zeroasic.com this year though, will see what’s he’s up to.
Kochise,
Yea, that’s a pretty good example to sum up the arguments in this thread.
https://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/adapteva-status/
If nvidia didn’t exist there are others willing and able to fill the market, but more and more what seems to happen in business is one or two players take the entire pie and prevent alternatives from being viable
How do you fix “winner takes all capitalism”? I don’t believe there are any entities in the private sector that are willing and able to stand up against the power of those at the top. Furthermore, as it stands today’s governments are generally aligned with corporate interests. Both these facts suggest that things are not going to change, at least not until inequality becomes increasingly dire.
I am looking forward to see what their 3050 looks like. I am quite fond of these low profile GPUs which do not require a charging port, and turn older office machines into decent media centres and/or light gaming boxes. The requirement is to remain below 75W. I am pretty sure they can achieve something pretty impressive within these parameters.