Nvidia expands the RTX 3000 series with new high- and low-end GPUs

Nvidia used its CES “special address” today to tease the company’s top-of-the-line RTX 3090 Ti GPU alongside other GPUs and a completely new class of “dual format” gaming monitor aimed at esports pros.

The 3090 Ti, which Geforce Senior VP Jeff Fisher referred to as the company’s “next BFGPU,” will include a hefty 24GB of G6X memory, capable of up to 21Gbps of bandwidth (Nvidia called it the “fastest ever” in its GPUs). That will help the card push out an impressive 40 Shader-Teraflops, 78 RT-Teraflops, and 320 Tensor-Terfalops, Fisher said. Pricing and release date info weren’t discussed, but more details will be available “later this month,” he added.

Elsewhere in the RTX line, Nvidia announced the RTX 3050, a $249 GPU available starting January 27. Sold in the presentation as an upgrade to the aging GTX 1050 budget workhorse, the 3050 sports 2nd-generation RT cores and 3rd-generation tensor cores using Nvidia’s Ampere architecture. That will let it run AAA games like Doom Eternal and Guardians of the Galaxy at 60 fps or higher with DLSS on, even with ray-tracing enabled, Fisher said. The 3050 will be capable of 9 Shader-Teraflops and 18 RT-Teraflops and come with 8GB of G6 memory.

The RTX 3050 announcement comes literally minutes after AMD’s announcement of the RX 6500 XT, which is positioned in the same general performance tier for $50 less. We’ll need to see how each one performs in real-world tests, of course—and whether you can buy either of them for anything approaching their list prices in the coming months.

In the laptop space, Nvidia said 160 new RTX-powered laptops will be coming soon, starting at $799. That includes RTX 3080 Ti laptops capable of 120 fps performance and RTX 3070 Ti laptops capable of 100 fps (both rated here at “1440p Ultra” settings, apparently). The 3080 Ti laptops will start at $2,499, while the 3070 Ti laptops will start at $1,499, and both will be available starting on February 1.

Aside from graphics cards, the most surprising announcement in Nvidia’s presentation was a new category of “dual-format” gaming monitors. Targeted at esports pros, these 27-inch monitors can run games at 1440p and up to 360 Hz when detail and aiming accuracy are important. Many popular esports titles can run at those resolutions these days without sacrificing the top-end frame rates that pros require. When players want to prioritize frame rate and lower latency on higher-end games, though, the monitors can switch to a 1080p mode that blacks out the edges of the screen for a 25-inch diagonal display area.

AOC, Asus, MSI, and Viewsonic will all be making displays that support this new function; they will also feature G-Sync adaptive refresh rates and Nvidia’s Reflex latency analyzer. There are no details on pricing or release dates for any of these models.