The RTX 3000 series has finally been revealed in all its glory, but how does its flagship, the 3090, compare to the last-generation king, the RTX 2080 Ti?
Nvidia’s next-generation graphics cards have finally been officially unveiled, and if Nvidia’s own claims are anything to go by, they set new standards for power and performance. At the very top of the pile stands the new RTX 3090, a monstrous card that may be more Titan-like than Ti, but as the most powerful graphics card Nvidia has ever made, comparisons to the last-generation kingpin are worth making. When it comes to the best of the best, the 3090 and 2080 Ti are two (non) titans of the graphics card game, but how different are they, really? Is the 2080 Ti still worth buying if you can find it at a good price? The RTX 2080 Ti originally released on September 28,2018, priced at $1,199 for the Nvidia Founders Edition. The “Standard Edition,” which acted as a base for third-party cards, had a base price of $999, though Nvidia’s board partners typically added more capable cooling, greater clock speeds, and other features that raised the price to as much as $1,900 in extreme cases. While technically still available, the 2080 Ti is no longer in production and stock is extremely limited. Some more expensive options are still available, and the secondhand market is expected to be extremely busy as RTX 3000 graphics cards become available, but finding a new 2080 Ti is not easy. The RTX 3090 was unveiled on September 1,2020, but isn’t on sale just yet. It will hit store shelves on September 24, with a price tag of $1,499. This is substantially more expensive than the original cost of the 2080 Ti, making it even more of a niche card. Still, it’s far more capable than the Titan RTX, which debuted at $2,500 just a couple of years ago, so if you want the best of the best, it might be a cost worth paying when it goes on sale. Nvidia released some stark performance numbers for its RTX 3090 during its September press event, giving us our first real idea of what the new-generation card can do. Although we’ll need to wait for third-party reviews to know for sure how capable the new card is compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, Nvidia’s own first-party numbers and raw specifications for the two cards give us some idea of what to expect. The RTX 3090 has a staggering number of CUDA cores — over 10,000. That’s almost 2,000 more than the RTX 3080, and more than double that of the RTX 2080 Ti.
