Quote:NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3070 just six weeks ago, and today, we're reviewing the Palit RTX 3070 JetStream OC. I had the review mostly finished, but couldn't get the last bits done because of the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3060 Ti launches. Out of the box, Palit has overclocked their RX 3070 JetStream OC to a rated boost clock of 1815 MHz, which is a 90 MHz increase over the Founders Edition. This turns into a real-life performance gain of 2%—not a whole lot, but other custom designs are similar. On average, at 1440p, we found the JetStream OC to be 2% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, 15% ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti, and 53% faster than the RTX 2070, which is pretty nice. The RTX 3080 is 21% faster, at 30% higher pricing. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 is only 4% faster than the Palit JetStream, at higher MSRP.

With those performance numbers, RTX 3070 is the perfect choice for the huge 1440p gamer crowd, but the card also has enough muscle to run many titles at 4K 60 FPS, especially if you are willing to dial down settings a little bit. The RTX 3070 is also a great choice for 1080p Full HD if you want to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor with 120 or 144 Hz. For just 1080p 60 Hz, it's overkill unless next-gen titles go overboard with their hardware requirements, which is highly unlikely. NVIDIA launched the RTX 3060 Ti just recently, which is a decent alternative for these scenarios, too, but falls back a little bit in performance, especially when betting on RTX you should be tempted to consider the RTX 3070.
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Right now, it is hard to comment on pricing because all cards are out of stock. On eBay and other platforms, scalpers have put up listings at terrible prices that don't reflect a realistic price point either. For the Palit RTX 3070 JetStream OC, we're expecting an MSRP of around $520, which is a reasonable price point relative to the $500 for the FE. Even just $20 more isn't easy to justify—you're getting a better cooler, but it will end up running louder and a bit warmer than the Founders Edition. The factory overclock yields 2% in real-life performance, which is not that big of a difference, either. AMD has priced their Radeon RX 6800 at $580, which is a pretty big increase over $520 for 4% more gaming performance and worse raytracing performance. AMD does offer 16 GB on their RDNA 2 cards, but I'm not convinced it will make a significant difference in the future, and it certainly does not today. Let's hope that supply normalizes soon, so you can get you hands on these fantastic new graphics cards.

Quote:With the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, NVIDIA is finally pushing Ampere below the $500 price point, which makes it attractive to an even larger audience of gamers. The new RTX 3060 Ti is based on the same GA104 graphics processor as the RTX 3070, just with some rendering units disabled. The RTX 3060 Ti is targeted at definite 1440p gaming with 60 FPS and entry-level 4K at lower details or with DLSS enabled. Raytracing is a core focus of NVIDIA's Ampere lineup, too. The RTX 3060 Ti will offer a great RT experience at 1080p and 1440p in most titles.

Averaged over our test suite at 1440p resolution, we find that the RTX 3060 Ti beats the RTX 2080 Super by 3%, which makes it only 12% slower than the RTX 2080 Ti that did cost a fortune not long ago. The performance uplift over the RTX 2060 is a staggering 58%, 38% more than the RTX 2060 Super. The RTX 3060 Ti sits right in the middle of the AMD competition—the RX 5700 XT is 21% behind the RTX 3060 Ti and the RX 6800 is 20% faster, which suggests we'll soon see an RX 6700 Series that will go head-to-head with the RTX 3060 Ti.

With these performance numbers, the RTX 3060 Ti is an excellent choice for gamers using the 1440p resolution. It also has enough horsepower to handle 4K, but you'll have to reduce details a little bit in the most demanding games. Considering that price, this will be a reasonable tradeoff for many. I can also imagine plenty of 1080p Full HD gamers wanting the RTX 3060 Ti because it will give them enough FPS for high refresh-rate monitors, even with enabled raytracing at maximum details.
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The RTX 3060 Ti improves power efficiency once again—by a few percent over RTX 3070 and 10+% over RTX 3080/3090. AMD has launched their new RDNA2 Radeon cards just recently, which are doing a little bit better than Ampere in performance per watt; however, the RTX 3060 Ti can make up a bit of ground here, too. Just like for previous NVIDIA generations, power efficiency is the cornerstone for a successful product. If power draw were higher, heat output would go up, which would require a louder or larger cooler and a more complex PCB design, all of which increases production cost, too.

While there has been a lot of discussion on 10 GB VRAM for the GeForce RTX 3080, even more so considering AMD offers 16 GB on their cards, the RTX 3060 Ti will be perfectly fine with 8 GB. It offers substantially lower shading power compared to these "4K" cards, so the limiting factor will be the shading-rate capability, not the amount of memory. Next-gen consoles do have more memory, but their 16 GB is for the OS, game, and graphics combined, which means effective graphics memory is close enough to the 8 GB offered by the RTX 3060 Ti. I've been hearing good things from developers about the direct-to-GPU disk streaming capabilities of the new consoles, especially on PS5, which could reduce VRAM requirements considerably. Guess we'll have to wait and see. Should you ever feel VRAM is running out, just sell the RTX 3060 Ti and buy whatever card is right at that time.

NVIDIA is positioning the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition at $399, which is an extremely competitive price. At that price point, it offers price/performance comparable to the GTX 1660 Super, which has the best price/performance ratio of all NVIDIA offerings. It would also be a better deal than the Radeon RX 5600 XT. If you can find an RTX 3060 Ti at $400, then definitely go for it. I'm having my doubts, though. Looking at recent launches from both AMD and NVIDIA, it seems MSRP prices are a fantasy true for only the first batch, there to impress potential customers, with actual retail pricing ending up much higher. Looking at the other RTX 3060 Ti reviews today, we had a hard time getting price points out of many manufacturers, and what we got was substantially higher than $400, with the ASUS STRIX at $500, MSI Gaming X at $470, and Palit at $440+. From vendors, I heard that "the supply should be pretty good," but that "it also might not be enough for more than a few hours" or that "we might see $500 soon," so let's wait a few days and hope people will actually be able to buy this fantastic graphics card at reasonable pricing.

Quote:In a sad turn of fate, 40 cargo boxes of RTX 3090's were stolen from MSI's factory in China this morning, amounting to $336,500 worth of stolen graphics cards. MSI has notified the police regarding the matter and posted a reward of 100,000 Yuan ($15k) for anyone who has useful information regarding the RTX 3090 cargo boxes' whereabouts.

MSI's communications on the matter indicate that the factory's shipping area is covered by video surveillance. The company also frequently inspects the trucks that come in and out of the campus. As a result, MSI believes an insider stole the cards. MSI also offers clemency for any participant that steps forward, provided they help locate the stolen items.
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Luckily, this shouldn't upset the market too much. After doing some quick math, the amount of RTX 3090's missing comes to around 220 units, which isn't a lot. But that means there will be a deficit in MSI RTX 3090 SKUs if these cards were headed to your location. But luckily, this is just a single batch, and none of the other AIB partners had cards stolen.

Quote:This is the second issue for MSI in recent months that involved inventory allocation ending up somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. Back in early October, the company took heat for the fact that one of its subsidiaries, Starlit Partner, was selling MSI RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards for well above MSRP, even as these GPUs were sold out at Amazon and Newegg.

We have no information on whether the two incidents could be related in any fashion. In one case, an OEM partner somehow gained access to GPUs it should not have been allowed to resell and then sold them far above MSRP, but this could be explained by anything from an inventory system error to an inside decision to “accidentally” funnel some cards to a company that shouldn’t have been allowed to sell them. That’s potentially a very different type of crime from arranging for a bunch of MSI GPUs to get loaded on the wrong truck without anyone noticing.
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The theft is another symptom of how bad the allocation of pretty much everything is right now, and what’s that doing to prices. There are RTX 3090 GPUs on eBay listing as having sold for $2,500 or more, which shows why someone would take the challenge on in the first place. Two hundred RTX 3090 GPUs at $2,500 each is a cool $500K.

Unfortunately, these prices are also why there’s no way to get your hands on much of the latest technology from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Sony, or Microsoft. Low yields, high demand, and COVID-damaged supply lines have collectively made shipping products difficult. Hopefully, MSI is able to recover its property and find whichever individual at the company is responsible for the thefts.

Quote:Demand for the latest consumer-grade graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia exceeds supply so badly that the scalping business now thrives more than ever. But gamers aren't the only customers who want to buy the latest GPUs. Apparently demand for Nvidia's A100 among data centers, scientists, and the HPC community is so high that it will take several months for the company to catch up, its VP recently admitted.

"It is going to take several months to catch up some of the demand," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing Business Unit at Nvidia, at Wells Fargo TMT Broker Conference Call. "What's exciting is the sort of the interest and growth in both training and inference. […] Every time we introduce a new architecture, it's a game changer, right? So A100 is 20x better performance than V100, and with that comes a new wave of demand and interest in our products." (based on SeekingAlpha's transcript.)

Quote:Scalping has become one of the most irritating things afflicting the PC hardware and gaming console markets at the moment. With scalpers snatching up what little volume there is of the latest hardware, they make buying a new graphics card or CPU or game console nearly impossible -- at least at the MSRP. So Data Engineer Michael Driscoll from dev.to set out to see just how much money these scalpers have made off of the recent shiny new hardware, to hopefully get an idea as to how long this problem will last.

Driscoll created a program that can grab all of eBay's sold listings for the latest generation AMD and Nvidia silicon, as well as the two new consoles, and put them all together to get an idea of how prices were trending and how much money scalpers were making on these products. While eBay isn't the only place scalpers can sell products, it's where most scalpers go to sell the latest and greatest Nvidia and AMD hardware.

But first, a step back: If you don't know what scalping is, it's when a person (or company) buys a product for the sole purpose of making a profit off of it, specifically, selling it for much more money than the MSRP. This "hobby" works due to supply and demand; when supply is low and demand is high, scalpers can make huge profits. Because if demand is high enough, there will be a customer base that simply won't care how much that product will cost and buy it anyway. When supply starts meeting demand on a broad enough scale, scalpers lose almost all momentum because buyers can go to official retailers and buy the product at a fair price.

Michael's graphs aren't based on actual prices. Rather they are based on percentages, with each product's MSRP being the baseline. That makes reading these graphs a bit easier.
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All that said, we have good news, at least for PC enthusiasts and gamers: Besides consoles, most PC hardware components show an overall downtrend in prices. Hopefully, this trend will continue, and prices will get lower as we roll into 2021. The lower the prices go, the better for consumers because that means there's more volume going around and/or lessening demand.

Either way, assuming trends continue, if you're looking to buy a new GPU or AMD CPU and you don't need it by the end of the year, it may be a good idea to sit out the holiday season and check back in again sometime in January.

Quote:eBay scams that try to trick unsuspecting, innocent people into spending all their hard-earned cash on a photo or an empty box are nothing new, but what about when those same scams are aimed at scalping bots? That’s the latest anti-bot trend to rise out of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti launch, which like other Ampere cards before it, sold out within minutes of release thanks to bots buying up all the stock to resell at a markup on auction websites like eBay and stockX.
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But as enthusiasts face empty promises from manufacturers and silence from both primary retailers and platforms that enable scalping like eBay, some feel like gray market vigilante action is the only recourse available to them.

“Scalpers are inadvertently running a dilution attack on ‘value’ in the markets they attack,” Bates said. “If eBay killed the scalping market, people like myself wouldn't have to go after the scalpers…[but] since the government is not making scalping illegal, it's on us as citizens to do something about it.”

Regardless of their morality or efficacy, the core issue enabling scams and encouraging vigilante action is scalpers. After talking to some of the people behind these listings ourselves, so long as platforms allow resellers free reign, listings like these photos will always pop up, even as eBay works to remove them.

Maybe RTX 3080 haikus will be the next trend. We've already seen this anti-scalper photo strategy retroactively applied to RTX 3080s, after all. But until the core reselling issue is resolved, we suggest carefully reading over all item descriptions before you click buy.

Quote:Compact gaming systems have proven to be pretty popular in recent years. Still, surprisingly, Nvidia opted to equip its GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics board with a cooling system that makes it 242mm long, way longer than a small Mini-ITX case can accommodate. Fortunately, not all of its partners have followed suit, and Asus has released one of the industry's first GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards for Mini-ITX PCs.
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At present, the Dual GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Mini is probably among the highest-performing Mini-ITX graphics boards on the market. Meanwhile, GPU makers have historically have managed to build 250-Watt Mini-ITX GPUs, so over time, we might see something even more powerful.

Quote:A new HP OEM GeForce driver points to the two distinct approaches NVIDIA is possibly taking to develop its new high-end GeForce RTX 30-series SKU positioned between the $699 RTX 3080 and the $1,499 RTX 3090; particularly in the wake of the $999 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT launch. The OEM driver's GPU support list references a number of unreleased graphics cards based on the "GA102" silicon, including engineering samples of 11 GB and 12 GB variants of the RTX 3080; and an RTX 3080 Ti.
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The RTX 3080 Ti appears to be a whole different beast. Although the HP document doesn't mention its core-configuration or memory size, older reports have pointed at the possibility of this SKU featuring 9,984 CUDA cores, and the full 384-bit wide memory bus (possibly with 12 GB of memory). Even older reports point to the likelihood of the RTX 3080 Ti retaining the 320-bit memory bus of the RTX 3080, but doubling the memory amount to 20 GB.

Elsewhere in the list we see references to the RTX 3070 Ti, a SKU whose existence is highly likely, given that the RTX 3070 faces stiff competition from AMD's RX 6800. AMD is able to market the RX 6800 at $579 on virtue of not just higher performance, but also double the memory amount as the RTX 3070, at 16 GB, which runs faster, at 16 Gbps. An older report points to the RTX 3070 Ti being based on the "GA102" silicon, with 58 streaming multiprocessors (7,424 CUDA cores), and a 320-bit wide memory interface. It remains to be seen if NVIDIA uses faster GDDR6X, or conventional GDDR6 with this one.

Quote:Renowned infrared (IR) photographer Fritzchens Fritz has delighted us with a couple high-resolution photographs of Nvidia's GA102 Ampere silicon. The GA102, which is featured inside the GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 and is also rumored to power the upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
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If you look very closely at the die shot, you'll see Ampere's specifications come to life. Twitter user Locuza has added annotations to Fritz's photographs for better visualization. The GA102, in particular, contains seven Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs) whereby each GPC holds 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). Therefore, the GA102 die has a grand total of 84 SMs. Consequently, each SM contains 128 CUDA cores, four Tensor cores and one RT cores. A complete GA102 die works out to 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores and 84 RT cores.

Quote:German news outlet Igor's Lab has received some tasty information regarding Nvidia's approaching Ampere-powered graphics cards. It would appear that the chipmaker has reshuffled the launch dates for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3060. Until we receive official confirmation, take this rumor with a pinch of salt.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti was rumored to debut next month, probably at CES 2021. However, Igor's sources claim that Nvidia has pushed the launch to after the Chinese New Year holidays. Therefore, the up-and-coming challenger to AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT won't arrive until after February 17.
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According to Igor, the GeForce RTX 3060 will take the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's place at CES 2021. The GeForce RTX 3060 is rumored to be available in two variants: one with 12GB of GDDR6 memory and another with 6GB of GDDR6 memory. The first could launch around CES 2021, while the latter might not come until the end of the month.

Quote:NVIDIA today announced their RTX A6000 series of graphics cards, meant to perform as graphics accelerators for professional workloads. And the announcement marks a big departure for the company's marketing, as the Quadro moniker has apparently been dropped. The RTX A6000 includes all raytracing resources also present on consumer RTX graphics cards, and marks a product segmentation from the company's datacenter-geared A40. The RTXA6000 features a full-blown GA102 chip - meaning 10752 CUDA cores powering single-precision compute performance of up to 38.7 TFLOPs (3.1 TLFOPs higher than that of the GeForce RTX 3090). Besides offering NVIDIA's professional driver support and features, the RTX A6000 features 48 GB of GDDR6 (note the absence of the X) memory - ensuring everything and the kitchen sink can be stored in the cards' VRAM. GDDR6X doesn't currently offer the per-chip density of GDDR6 solution, hence why NVIDIA opted for the lower-performing, yet denser memory variant.

Quote:Nvidia said on Wednesday that it would host its "GeForce RTX: Game On" event in mid-January to reveal the "latest innovations in gaming and graphics." The company naturally did not give a clue about the exact nature of the announcement, but it will definitely cover consumer graphics.
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Over the past few weeks Nvidia's management said that it had multiple Ampere-powered products in the pipeline. We do not know for sure what Nvidia is planning to reveal on January 12, 2021, but the company says it will be an important announcement for gaming, so stay tuned.

Quote:With the current industry rumors pointing towards a high-end GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, we can only speculate that it will be presented at the show. This launch date would contradict previous reports that this specific GPU is landing in February due to the supposed postponing. We have to wait and see what the event is about, so stay tuned on January 12th at 09:00 am PST for our coverage of the event.

Quote:NVIDIA has decided to extend the availability of their bundle offer for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards. The company announced last October that gamers who purchase those particular graphics cards would receive a code for the latest entry in the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise. In hindsight, this wasn't much of a big deal for the company; considering general availability for the RTX 30-series, it stands to reason that not many codes were activated, anyway. However, and probably in relation to the continuing shortages on NVIDIA's latest GPUs, the company has extended the bundle's offer through January 11th 2021 - the same day CES is happening. Codes must be redeemed via the GeForce Experience application on a system with a qualifying graphics card installed.

Quote:MSI has quietly added a version of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card with a blower-type cooler to its product family. Surprisingly, the GeForce RTX 3090 Aero 24G uses a heatsink that resembles Nvidia's coolers used by its GeForce GTX 480 'Fermi' graphics boards from 2010.
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Since MSI's RTX 3090 Aero 24G does not use a closed cooler that exhausts all the hot air outside the chassis, some of the hot air is exhausted through the heatsink and therefore remains in the box. In general, this may be considered as an advantage since such a design maximizes performance of the cooler without increasing rotational speed of the blower. Meanwhile, not all hot air is exhausted outside. This might not be a huge problem with one graphics card installed, but this may create some challenges for setups with multiple AIBs. Just like other GeForce RTX 3090 boards, MSI's Aero variant is equipped with a backlpate to cool down memory on the back and ensure rigidness, which does not cover the whole board presumably not to make the card thicker on the back.
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MSI has not announced MSRP of the GeForce RTX 3090 Aero 24G, but expect its price to be in the same ballpark with other RTX 3090 models.

Quote:NVIDIA could take a similar approach to sub-segmenting the upcoming GeForce RTX 3060, as it did for the "Pascal" based GTX 1060, according to a report by Igor's Lab. Mr Wallossek predicts a mid-January launch for the RTX 3060 series, possibly on the sidelines of the virtual CES. NVIDIA could develop two variants of the RTX 3060, one with 6 GB of memory, and the other with 12 GB. Both the RTX 3060 6 GB and RTX 3060 12 GB probably feature a 192-bit wide memory interface. This would make the RTX 3060 series the spiritual successors to the GTX 1060 3 GB and GTX 1060 6 GB, although it remains to be seen if the segmentation is limited to the memory size, and doesn't also go into the chip's core-configuration. It's likely that the RTX 3060 series goes up against AMD's Radeon RX 6700 series, with the RX 6700 XT being rumored to feature 12 GB of memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface.

Quote:It seems NVIDIA and Samsung's partnership in bringing to life the green company's semiconductor designs isn't about to end anytime soon. Semiconductor analysts and insiders have said that NVIDIA and Samsung etched a new manufacturing deal on December 17th that still relates to the company's in-high-demand RTX-30 series graphics cards, which should see Samsung increase output - particularly at its Hwaseong plant - to sate the seemingly unquenchable demand from consumers and scalpers alike. The deal, which is roughly valued at "hundreds of billions won" will see Samsung double down on its 8 nm output for NVIDIA's latest gaming chips. This seems to put to rest speculation on an RTX 30-series redesign for TSMC's allegedly better 7 nm process - and according to the industry insiders, NVIDIA looked to Samsung specifically because of the need for "quick delivery of the chips".

Quote:NVIDIA has launched its GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture three months ago. However, we are already getting information about the next-generation that the company plans to introduce. In the past, the rumors made us believe that the architecture coming after Ampere is allegedly being called Hopper. Hopper architecture is supposed to bring multi-chip packaging technology and be introduced after Ampere. However, thanks to @kopite7kimi on Twitter, a reliable source of information, we have data that NVIDIA is reportedly working on a monolithic GPU architecture that the company internally refers to as "ADxxx" for its codenames.

The new monolithically-designed Lovelace architecture is going make a debut on the 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, a whole year earlier than Hopper. It is unknown which foundry will manufacture the GPUs, however, both of NVIDIA's partners, TSMC and Samsung, are capable of manufacturing it. The Hopper is expected to arrive sometime in 2023-2024 and utilize the MCM technology, while the Lovelace architecture will appear in 2021-2022. We are not sure if the Hopper architecture will be exclusive to data centers or extend to the gaming segment as well. The Ada Lovelace architecture is supposedly going to be a gaming GPU family. Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, has appeared on NVIDIA's 2018 GTC t-shirt known as "Company of Heroes", so NVIDIA may have already been using the ADxxx codenames internally for a long time now.

Quote:Nvidia's last major launch was two years ago with the Turing architecture and RTX 20-series GPUs. Since then, Nvidia has released a slew of high-end, midrange, and budget offerings, plus the Super product refreshes, all built on TSMC's 12nm FinFET lithography. Meanwhile, AMD came out with its first 7nm GPUs in early 2019 with the Radeon VII and followed up with the Navi 1x RX 5700 series GPUs last July. One year later, Nvidia is finally ready to move beyond Turing and 12nm. It's about time.
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Anyway, saving $200 and buying a 3070 could make a lot of sense. It's interesting to note that the RTX 3070 is a substantial step down from the RTX 3080, however. The 3080 has 48% more GPU, RT, and Tensor cores, it has 20% more memory, and the memory is clocked 36% higher. That's a big enough gap that we could see an RTX 3070 Ti down the road, but at what price? Alternatively, wait and see what AMD's Navi 2x / RX 6000 GPUs can do, which we'll hear about more on October 28.

The bottom line is that the RTX 3080 is the new high-end gaming champion, delivering truly next-gen performance without a massive increase in price. If you've been sitting on a GTX 1080 Ti or lower, waiting for a good time to upgrade, that time has arrived. The only remaining question is just how competitive AMD's RX 6000, aka Big Navi, will be. Even with 80 CUs, on paper, it looks like Nvidia's RTX 3080 may trump the top Navi 2x cards, thanks to GDDR6X and the doubling down on FP32 capability. AMD might offer 16GB of memory, but it's probably going to be paired with a 256-bit bus and clocked quite a bit lower than 19 Gbps, which may limit performance.

Quote:Asus (via Twitter user HXL) has inadvertently confirmed the memory specifications for Nvidia's forthcoming GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. Although we've heard multiple rumors of the graphics cards, Asus is the first Nvidia partner to acknowledge their existence.

Apparently, Asus has already added the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 12GB and ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to its support database. The entries are at the bottom of the drop-down list, suggesting that Asus must have added the graphics card recently. The entries don't lead to anywhere, for now; however, the part numbers do lend credence to some of the rumored specifications that have made their rounds around town.
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Fortunately, Nvidia will reportedly offer the GeForce RTX 3060 with a 6GB setup as well, which will likely be the favorite flavor for many mainstream gamers. However, it would have been better if Nvidia had upped it to 8GB since 8GB is pretty much the standard in the contemporary gaming world.

Quote:MSI today unveiled the GeForce RTX 3090 AERO, the latest in the crop of RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards with rear-venting lateral airflow coolers, such as the ASUS RTX 3090 Turbo OC and the GIGABYTE RTX 3090 Turbo, targeting environments with restricted airflow (such as rendering farms). The MSI RTX 3090 AERO strongly resembles the reference-design of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 "Fermi."

Quote:Geeknetic.es made this as a part of the Spanish Fool's Day, which is December 28th. However, considering the current state of the RTX (and AMD RX) market, this is a nice satirical gotcha which I'll keep on TPU. Let's laugh at our misery instead of wallowing in it.

Quote:Let's be clear: the GeForce RTX 3090 is now the fastest GPU around for gaming purposes. It's also mostly overkill for gaming purposes, and at more than twice the price of the RTX 3080, it's very much in the category of GPUs formerly occupied by the Titan brand. If you're the type of gamer who has to have the absolute best, and price isn't an object, this is the new 'best.' For the rest of us, the RTX 3090 might be drool-worthy, but it's arguably of more interest to content creators who can benefit from the added performance and memory.
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The interesting thing is that as fast as the RTX 3090 is, Nvidia could have gone faster — for a higher price, naturally. TSMC's N7 and N7P nodes are in full production now, and Apple has chips coming off the N5 node. Samsung's 8N is more like 10nm++ and is a step down in density and power requirements. But with a line of buyers already soaking up TSMC's more advanced nodes, it can afford to charge more. Samsung was clearly a better value prospect for Nvidia, and at least for the RTX 3080, we end up with an extremely impressive GPU at a not-entirely-unreasonable price. The RTX 3090, meanwhile, claims the top honors for performance for anyone who's willing to pay for it.

Given what we've seen of Ampere so far, we're also excited to see what Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 will have to offer. We're still skeptical about it matching the RTX 2080 Ti performance in all games, but it should come close, and at a much more affordable price. It's also a 220W part, so you won't have to worry about a PSU upgrade if you have a relatively decent build.

The wildcard in the best graphics card competition is AMD's Big Navi. Current details say there will be 80 CU models with 16GB of memory, but on a 256-bit bus. The ray tracing performance for RDNA2 is also a massive question mark — Nvidia's Ampere can be up to twice as fast as Turing in some ray tracing tasks, while there are hints from the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 that suggest AMD might be taking a far more cautious approach to ray tracing.

Either way, we'll find out what those other cards can do soon enough. The RTX 3090 will probably remain at the top of the GPU benchmarks and performance hierarchy unless AMD can pull a rabbit out of its hat, but RTX 3080 levels of performance aren't out of the question. If AMD can come close to RTX 3080 or maybe even exceed it, at a lower price, that would be very interesting.

For gamers, waiting for the dust to settle — and inventory to build up — is a better plan than shelling out $1,500 for the RTX 3090.

Quote:Inadvertently, Gigabyte may just have confirmed the existence of not only a 20 GB RTX 3080 Ti but also a 12 GB RTX 3060 card. That may not sound like a big deal at face value, but if you ask me, it's something that's certainly worth getting excited about.

The information comes from a new EEC listing -- one that covers a plethora of cards. Details are scarce at this time, but the following product names tell enough of a story:
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But what makes these high-capacity cards interesting is their likelihood to stand up to the test of time. It's no industry secret that Nvidia's cards often lead the charge when it comes to running today's titles, but many also believe that AMD GPUs tend to 'age like a fine wine' much better. The reason for that is that AMD happily chucks more memory aboard its graphics card designs than Nvidia does, which helps with future games that require larger buffers.

So if you're like me, and you keep your graphics cards for a long, long time, then it might be worth the patience to sit on your pennies a little longer for these cards to come out.

Earlier rumors indicated that the RTX 3080 Ti might just pack the same 10,496 CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. However, no information is available yet about the GPU configuration of the alleged RTX 3060 -- though the word on the street is that it will come in 6 GB and 12 GB variants.

With these EEC listings up, chances are we'll be seeing the aforementioned cards announced soon. Of course, for official information, you'll have to sit tight a little longer until Nvidia's announcement comes around.

Quote:Availability for NVIDIA and AMD's latest graphics cards is dire, to say the least; the average consumer finds their stocks to be spotty, at best, with available cards quickly dropping into oblivion. Scalpers and their associates are part of the problem, as is already well-known; however, another element to this same problem - at least, when it comes to numerous graphics cards finding their way to the same consumers, instead of being available for others - is mining. Because while we are definitely not facing the same shortages as we were back in the day where everyone and their mother wanted to get into mining using our tried and true graphics cards, mining farms are still a reality, and they are making use of NVIDIA (and AMD's) latest graphics cards as well.

Case in point, a mining farm running as many as 78 PNY RTX 3080 graphics cards has surfaced in Las Vegas. This 78-card mining farm was apparently put together with a $100,000 budget (around $1,199 per card, not considering other installation costs). For that money, the mining farm should be capable of around 6,474 MH/s (83 MH/s per RTX 3080), which amounts to a monthly Ethereum production of around 17.3 ETH per month (pricing fluctuates, so we won't give an estimation on dollar value for each ETH). Associated electricity running costs with such a system, including cooling, should pan out around 23.4 kW (with an estimated 300 W of power for each card) at $8.34 per Kw.

Quote:Lenovo may have inadvertently disclosed the existence of several upcoming GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards. The Product Specifications Reference (PSREF) document for a certain Lenovo pre-built gaming desktop model, the Legion R5 28IMB05, lists out all its possible hardware options, covering CPU, graphics cards, and storage. The CPU options cover 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S" models that are already out; but things get interesting with the list of graphics options. In addition to certain RTX 20-series, and GTX 16-series SKUs, the list mentions certain RTX 30-series SKUs that haven't yet been announced by NVIDIA.

Among these unreleased GPUs are the GeForce RTX 3050, which is shown featuring 4 GB of GDDR6 memory; the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti with 6 GB of it; and the GeForce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) with 12 GB of it. The already-launched RTX 3070 also finds mention here. It's likely that these are OEM-exclusive SKUs, but if they're not, then we have our first look at how NVIDIA is handling product segmentation between the RTX 3050 Ti and the RTX 3060 (non-Ti), in a possible bid to avoid a repeat of the GTX 1060 3 GB vs. 6 GB confusion (where besides memory, the two SKUs also had different core-configurations). Based on the GA106 silicon, the GeForce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) is expected to feature a 192-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, which it populates with 12 GB of memory.

Quote:GPU shortages are bad enough already: the GeForce RTX 3090, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6800 all continue to sell out as fast as they're produced. Now, the best graphics cards are set to disappear even faster thanks to skyrocketing cryptocurrency prices. We've seen this pattern several times over the past decade since Bitcoin first came into existence, and every option at the top of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy will be impacted. It's the great GPU shortage of 2017 all over again. Sigh.

The root cause comes from the recent upward trend in Bitcoin and Ethereum pricing, which in turn impact the prices of all of the other alternative cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin saw relatively (for Bitcoin) stable prices of around $9,000-$10,000 during the first nine months of 2020, before going ballistic starting in October. Late December saw BTC surpass the previous high of around $20,000, and a brief surge saw prices hit nearly $35,000 this past week.

Gains in Ethereum are even more dramatic. Early 2020 saw prices of under $200 before ETH jumped to $400 around August. November broke $600, and the cryptocurrency settled in around that mark in December, but it spiked to over $1,000 during the past week.
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Again, we're not saying you should put money into building a mining PC farm, far from it. But we are saying that some people are going to do exactly that. Others will put money into procuring mining ASICs, but those are potentially even more difficult to find than GPUs. For example, the Innosilicon A10 Pro can theoretically do 500MH/s of Ethereum mining and draws less than 1000W of power. That's about $55 per day in profits for hardware that supposedly costs $5500. Naturally, it's sold out.

Eventually, we expect cryptocurrency prices and difficulty to reach equilibrium again. When and at what price that will happen is anyone's guess. In the meantime, it's going to continue to be a terrible time to buy a graphics card. Sorry.

Quote:According to kopite7kimi, a famous leaker of information about NVIDIA graphics cards, we have some pieces of data about NVIDIA's plans to bring back its SUPER series of graphics cards. The SUPER graphics cards have first appeared in the GeForce RTX 2000 series "Turing" GPUs with GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER designs, after which RTX 2060 followed. Thanks to the source, we have information that NVIDIA plans to give its newest "Ampere" 3000 series of GeForce RTX GPUs a SUPER overhaul. Specifically, the company allegedly plans to introduce GeForce RTX 3070 SUPER and RTX 3080 SUPER SKUs to its offerings.

Quote:Inadvertently, the folks behind Folding@Home might have just confirmed the RTX 3050's existence, along with the GPU it is built on: the GA107. The information comes from a GPU support list that comes with the latest installation — information that was right on our PCs and may have flown under the radar if it weren't spotted by Redditor u/TrueTech0.
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In addition to a plethora of Nvidia GPUs, the list also mentions a few AMD GPUs. The most notable entries here are the RTX 3080 Ti, 20GB RTX 3080, RTX 3070 Ti, Mobile RTX 3070 Max-Q, RTX 3060, Mobile RTX 3070 16GB (Max-Q), RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Max-Q, and the RTX 3050. A Turing-based Quadro RTX 3000 mobile GPU also stands out as a bit of an oddity, along with a presumably placeholder GA103 (which as far as we know doesn't exist and likely never will). The only new AMD parts (besides the already launched Navi 21 chips) are the Navi 22 and Navi 23 entries.
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Stepping up one tier, the RTX 3060 is supposed feature the GA106 GPU in both 6GB and 12GB variants. Currently missing from the list is the RTX 3050 Ti, which given all the other model numbers floating around in Nvidia land seems like a sure thing. It could feature a cut-back GA106 GPU that didn't make it to binning full RTX 3060s. Intriguingly, there's an RTX 3060 Engineering Sample listed as well, using the GA104 GPU. Depending on yields and other factors, we may see different RTX 3060 models in the future (e.g., similar to the RTX 2060 variants that used TU104).

For now, we wouldn't read too much into these entries. There's a lot to digest, but without any official word, there's a good chance that at least some of the information is simply a placeholder for potential future releases. AMD and Nvidia also do internal testing of GPUs that end up not getting a public release, which is particularly applicable to the Engineering Samples.

Quote:If you were upset about miners impacting demand for the already-short-in-supply graphics cards, brace yourself for today's news: China tariff exemptions that expired with the new year (via New York Times) mean that, among other products, GPU pricing will increase significantly (as noted on Reddit).

So far, Asus has already confirmed it needs to raise GPU and motherboard prices due to logistical complications and import tariffs, and other GPU vendors, including Zotac, MSI, EVGA, and Gigabyte, are likely to follow suit, or are already doing so silently. In fact, pricing on several families of third-party GPUs from those GPU makers has gone up in the last few days.
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Naturally, supply issues in GPU land don't help, and while tariffs certainly play a part, there's more going on than just import taxes. With COVID, international shipping costs have risen significantly due to reduced international passenger transport, and labor costs have also increased due to other logistical expenses, like employee shortages due to lockdowns and sick leave.

Many will opine that the tariffs situation could also be used as a scapegoat to increase MSRPs in the midst of the PC hardware shortage, especially when you consider that GPU prices are on the rise globally and not only in the US.

In the short run, Q1 and Q2 are likely to be rough quarters for hardware prices. The goal of these tariffs is to increase production in the US and increase local employment and decrease reliance on imported goods. Manufacturers could ship almost-finished products to the US and finish assembly and packaging locally to attempt to defray the impact of these steep import taxes, but this would take years and be more expensive than tariff-exempt imports, and it isn't a panacea. The catch is, most of the components in the supply chain are also impacted by the tariffs, which are applied as those components are shipped out of China. Because the tariffs only apply to goods shipped from China to the US, companies are more likely to reroute manufacturing to other low-cost labor countries to avoid the fees.

Quote:NVIDIA is reportedly preparing a new GeForce RTX 30-series SKU positioned around the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, as the company looks to fine-tune its lineup against the Radeon RX 6700 series. Called the GeForce RTX 3060 Ultra, the SKU is reportedly carved out from the same 8 nm "GA104" silicon as the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070; but with a different core-configuration, and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory. At this point, it is not known if the memory bus width is narrowed to 192-bit, or if the same 256-bit wide memory bus is used (with mixed memory chip density). WCCFTech posted a picture of the first custom-design RTX 3060 Ultra card, an ASUS TUF Gaming product, which it reports to be faster than the RTX 3060 Ti. The publication also reports the card's MSRP pricing to be USD $449.

Quote:Much to the surprise of no one, anywhere, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3060 today during its not-technically-part-of-CES 'special event.' The RTX 3060 will be coming to desktops and laptops in February, and the desktop part at least will feature 12GB of GDDR6. Will it join the best graphics cards as the new mainstream favorite, and where will it place on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy? Nvidia didn't provide too many details, but we expect it to land at roughly the performance of the outgoing RTX 2070 Super (maybe only RTX 2070).

The biggest news is perhaps the price. Nvidia says the card will launch at $329, which is less than the launch price of the RTX 2060 ($349). Whether you'll be able to find a card at that price any time soon is a different story. Given the current GPU shortages, plus cryptocurrency surges, we fully expect the RTX 3060 to sell out quickly. Maybe we'll end up pleasantly surprised, but don't count on it.
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Core specs weren't revealed, but Nvidia did give performance data. 13 TFLOPS and 25 RT TFLOPS with 101 Tensor TFLOPS puts it about 20-25 percent below the RTX 3060 Ti. Rumors and leaks strongly suggest the RTX 3060 will use a new GA106 GPU, though we may see future variants based off harvested GA104 GPUs.

The GA106 will only have support for six GDDR6 memory channels. In a somewhat unusual twist, Nvidia has announced the card will have 12GB of GDDR6 memory. That's 50 percent more memory than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, and even surpasses the RTX 3080. There have been leaks suggesting 6GB cards are also in the works, but whether those will be for laptops only, or an RTX 3050 Ti, isn't clear. There's still a distinct possibility the RTX 3060 will end up like the GTX 1060, with two variants with different memory capacities. Let's hope not, but ... probably.
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We're actually very happy to see 12GB, even if it's not absolutely necessary today, because plenty of games are already bumping into VRAM limits at 8GB, never mind 6GB. Whether the GPU will be fast enough to really use the additional capacity remains to be seen. In some games, the 12GB could actually put it close to the 3060 Ti, maybe even ahead of it, which would be a bit strange but not impossible.

We also expect Nvidia will launch updated RTX 30-series parts with double the VRAM of the existing GPUs at some point. Whether it's called the RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3080 Super, or RTX 3080 20GB (most likely the first), we should get higher VRAM configurations in the coming months. An RTX 3070 Ti with 16GB is also likely to show up. Those will inevitably cost more than the existing models, and considering the continuing GPU shortages it's probably not a bad idea for Nvidia to wait a bit before announcing and launching those parts.

We'll be back in February with the full review of the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB, to see how it stacks up against the rest of the current graphics card offerings. The price looks good, but then so do the other official prices on RTX 30-series cards. Let's hope supply can start to match demand.

Quote:Now that we've seen the RTX 3070 along with AMD's RX 6800, we have a better feel for the GPU market we're likely to see during the coming year. AMD doesn't have a viable alternative to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at the $400 price point yet, so for now, this is the undisputed upper mainstream champion. Some might say $400 isn't really a mainstream GPU, but given the sales of previous-gen GTX 1070 and RTX 2060 / 2060 Super cards, there are clearly plenty of people willing to spend that much money on a graphics card. And to be clear, this is a great card for that price.

The RTX 3060 Ti is about 35-40 percent faster than the previous-gen 2060 Super and about 30 percent faster than AMD's RX 5700 XT — and that's without even getting into ray tracing or DLSS support. In ray tracing games, the 3060 Ti lead grows to 40-45 percent over the 2060 Super, and AMD's RX 5000 series doesn't even have the option to try and run DXR games. Even against AMD's new RX 6800, though, the RTX 3060 Ti delivers better overall DXR performance — and can improve by around 30 percent on average for games that support DLSS, using DLSS Quality mode. Plus, Cyberpunk 2077 will launch in about ten days [not that I'm counting, #fanboy] with plenty of ray tracing effects and DLSS 2.0. The RTX 3070 is supposed to be good for 1440p ultra with ray tracing, or 4K ultra without ray tracing, which means the 3060 Ti should be able to handle those settings as well. And thankfully, unlike graphics cards, digital downloads of a game aren't going to sell out.

Which brings us to the problem of supply. We'll be shocked if RTX 3060 Ti doesn't sell out just as fast as the 3070, 3080, 3090, 6800, and 6800 XT. Hell, we've seen people buying used previous-gen cards off eBay for more than their original launch price, which is sad. It's not quite as bad as the GPU shortages during the great cryptocurrency mining craze of 2017, but it's not much better. And hey, Bitcoin is flirting with $20,000 per BTC again, so maybe there's still hope. (/sarcasm, if that's not clear.)

Anyway, Nvidia's CEO said Ampere supply likely wouldn't keep up with demand until 2021. That actually makes plenty of sense, as it takes about 5-6 months from placing an order for a bunch of chips (silicon wafers) to getting shipping graphics cards using those chips. Six months ago, we were right in the midst of the first COVID-19 surge, and there was a lot of uncertainty about the future. In retrospect, Nvidia could have doubled or even tripled its orders and probably been just fine, but we can't imagine what the reaction would have been had someone suggested that back in April! Hindsight, such a lovely thing.
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Right now, Nvidia just gave a nice boost in performance and features to the $400 market. The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a relatively small step down from the RTX 3070, with a larger step down in price. That hits the sweet spot in both price and performance — in fact, out of the current and previous-gen GPUs, it's the best overall card in price to performance ratio (fps per dollar). If you're hoping to upgrade to a new graphics card, the RTX 3060 Ti definitely belongs on your shortlist.

Quote:The GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition is everything we expected. It's a lower power card with a smaller footprint, and it basically trades blows with the previous generation king of the hill, the RTX 2080 Ti. Two years later, and $500 now potentially gets you the same performance as the old $1,200 GPUs. If there's one constant in the world of GPUs, it's the ever-increasing performance at any given price point. But we're in the midst of a lot of GPU stuff, and without seeing what AMD's Big Navi brings to the table, it's impossible to give a final verdict for the RTX 3070.

AMD will spill the beans on Big Navi tomorrow, but we don't expect the hardware to arrive for review until mid-November or later. That's fine because, in all likelihood, almost no one is going to be able to buy an RTX 3070. Just like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 sold out within minutes (or seconds) of launch, we expect the initial batches of RTX 3070 will go fast. Historically speaking, that's what always happens for new high-end cards. RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti sold out at launch; GTX 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti also sold out at launch; and so did GTX 970 and 980. The question isn't so much whether the new GPUs will sell out, but rather how long they'll be harder to purchase.
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The bottom line is that we can't declare a winner right this moment. Nvidia's Ampere RTX 30-series GPUs are potent, and the RTX 3070 brings new levels of performance to the $500 market. We expect to see 30-series parts push down into the $300-$400 range in the coming months as well. AMD's Big Navi is more of a wildcard since we don't quite know what to expect in terms of ray tracing performance or DLSS alternatives. AMD may have as many as four Navi 2x GPUs launching in the next month or two (or three or four), also with prices ranging from perhaps $250 up to $600 or more.

If you're already set on going with Nvidia and don't want to spend more than $500, you can try to pick up an RTX 3070 on Thursday. If you're willing to spend a bit more money, we'd argue the added VRAM, bandwidth, and performance of the RTX 3080 means it's the better option at $700 — not that you can find RTX 3080 in stock, but you can keep trying. For the undecided, we suggest waiting to see what happens with Big Navi, and of course, those who prefer AMD GPUs will want an RX 6000 regardless of how it stacks up.

Whatever your GPU choice, it's an exciting time after about two years of waiting for the next big thing to arrive. Of course, there will be even faster options next year, so if you already have a capable GPU, just enjoy it until it's no longer sufficient. Maybe by then, we'll be talking about RTX 6070 and RX 9000.

Quote:If the shortages didn't already ruin the graphics card market, the new tariffs certainly will. Asus was the first manufacturer to manifest the increase in graphics card pricing, and according to a recent report fom The Verge, EVGA and Zotac have also raised the pricing for their corresponding GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) products.
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EVGA, for one, has already given its customers the heads-up on the brand's website. The new pricing went into effect as of January 11, but EVGA will respect the original pricing for customers who are on its Notify Queue system or Step-Up Queue until April 16.
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Unlike EVGA, the tariffs appear to have a greater impact on Zotac. The brand's GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards revealed a price spike of up to 22.6%. As for the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070, the graphics cards now cost up to 13% and 20.7% more, respectively. Even the recently announced GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is selling for up to 20.5% more in comparison to just one month ago.

It should be pointed out that graphics cards aren't alone in this. The tariffs also affect motherboards as well. A previous report from a Chinese publication claimed that some of Intel's budget-oriented chipsets are in shortage. If we factor in the tariffs, we could see motherboard pricing soaring very soon.

All of this comes off as more salt on the wounds of already limited GPU supplies and elevated prices, and we'll likely see price increases on graphics cards using AMD GPUs as well. Nvidia's own Founders Edition cards haven't had official price increases yet. The RTX 3070 Founders Edition box still bears a "made in China" label, however, so we could see price changes there as well in the coming days.

Quote:NVIDIA on Tuesday announced a roll-out of its implementation of the PCI-SIG resizable base-address register (BAR) feature to select GeForce products. The feature enables your CPU to see the entire video memory of your graphics card as one addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. This should improve certain kinds of 3D rendering workloads, and game engines that are optimized to use it should see a tangible performance boost. AMD earlier introduced the exact same feature under its marketing name "Smart Access Memory," with its Radeon RX 6000 series.

NVIDIA announced that resizable-BAR support will be made available to GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" desktop graphics cards, notebooks that have RTX 30-series "Ampere" mobile GPUs, and future products. The support requires not just a compatible graphics card, but also a motherboard that supports the feature. Most leading motherboard- and OEM desktop manufacturers began rolling out resizable-BAR support through UEFI firmware updates. Using the feature requires you to run your machine in native UEFI mode (with CSM disabled).

Quote:It’s not uncommon for the latest computer hardware to be in short supply, but the pandemic has pushed everything into overdrive. Being stuck inside for months on end has led to an explosion of interest in gaming, and that has made new high-end hardware like the AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs and Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs nigh impossible to find. Newegg has a controversial solution: raffles.
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This week, the site briefly put up a page that explains its solution. It took the page down shortly thereafter but not before the wider internet got a peek. The “Newegg Shuffle” event will allow interested customers to join a lottery for select parts during a three-hour window. Sometimes these will be bundles of several components that include the highly sought-after AMD and Nvidia hardware, and other times it will be just those components on their own.

Newegg will do a drawing, and those who win the lottery will be contacted via email to complete their purchases. Products will be sold to winners on a first-come, first-served basis, and you will have just two hours to complete your purchase before Newegg goes to the next person on the list. With this system, you won’t have to hope you happen to be watching when new stock pops up and that you can beat everyone else to the checkout. Instead, you’ll have to hope that Newegg’s random number generator favors you.

There was some clear aggravation around the internet when Newegg’s page went live. The only bundle with an RTX 3080 had an Intel motherboard, and Intel CPUs aren’t exactly in short supply. Newegg later clarified this was just a “test” to get feedback and improve the system. The retailer says that future Shuffle events will include single items in addition to combos. However, we don’t know when that will be. It still might be your best chance to get a retail-priced CPU or GPU for the foreseeable future.

Quote:Popular hardware monitoring tool HWInfo64 has just received a new update, version 6.42 that adds support for "GDDR6X Memory Junction Temperature." This feature will allow you to check your VRAM temperature if you have a GDDR6X equipped Ampere card like the RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. This could be particularly useful if you own a Founders Edition model, as several months ago we reported on a discovery from Igor's lab in which GDDR6X modules on the RTX 3080 Founders Edition model ran dangerously hot.

After some testing with the new HWInfo64 version 6.42, we've validated these same high VRAM temperatures that Igor discovered. Looping Metro Exodus at 4K Ultra settings for several minutes on an RTX 3080 Founders Edition allowed the GDDR6X modules to hit a peak temperature of 102C. The TJmax for GDDR6X is 95C.

However, this changes when enabling DLSS and Ray Tracing. The RTX 3080 with Metro Exodus at the same settings hit a peak temperature of 94C. We also tested an RTX 3090 Founders Edition in Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS and Ray Tracing enabled. GDDR6X temperatures for that card peaked at 100C.

But when it comes to Ethereum mining, temperatures go to a whole other level: When mining on both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, we found that the GDDR6X modules would peak at a much higher 110C, and the GPU would downclock itself severely to compensate for the ridiculously high VRAM temperature. This occurred on multiple different boards, from various vendors. And that's before applying any overclocking settings, which some miners like to do in order to chase every last bit of hashing performance.

Quote:The prices of graphics cards have been perhaps the most controversial topic among PC enthusiasts lately. High demand and low supply of the latest generation GPUs have lead to the massive price increase over MSRP. Graphics card makers, AMD and NVIDIA, have already announced that this situation is not going to get better until March ends. However, there seems to be another possible issue appearing slowly on the horizon. According to the Chinese website MyDrivers, the prices of graphics cards are expected to increase thanks to the increasing prices of memory used in them, presumably including both the slower GDDR6 and the faster GDDR6X memory.

The source claims that the new memory price increase is going to take place after February 12th, when Chinese New Year ends. As both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere generation and AMD Radeon 6000 series generation use GDDR6X and GDDR6 respectively, that means that the increased prices of these memory types could increase the MSRP, which is already above its original intent.

Quote:Valve has just updated its Steam Hardware Survey with results from January 2021. If you believe the numbers for videocards, Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs now account for over 1% of the total gaming market on Steam. These are some of the best graphics cards, but demand is so high (and supply is so low) that finding one for sale is virtually impossible, and prices are much higher than the launch MSRPs.

I've followed the Steam Hardware Survey for a long time, wondering at the statistics behind the data. The past few months give me (even more) reason to suspect it isn't a proper random sampling of users, which means no one should attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions. Valve has never revealed any details of how the survey gets conducted, but I suspect (based on being sampled on three different PCs all within a day or two of each other, all of which were using a 3080 card for testing) there's a higher chance for it to ask for someone's hardware details if it doesn't recognize the graphics card. This means new cards like the RTX 30-series are much more likely to get included. However, that's just a guess, and it's possible Valve is actually doing a proper random sampling and simply hasn't made that fact public. Still, without a clear explanation of the methodology, we shouldn't take these figures as any true indication of the distribution of various GPU models or other hardware, even among Steam users. Regardless, the numbers are still interesting and fun to gawk at, wherever they come from.
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Let me close by once again calling on Valve to do the right thing and provide a clear statement on the statistics behind the survey. If it's a random sampling, tell us so we (and more importantly, game developers) know we can put more confidence in the numbers, and tell us (approximately) how many PCs were surveyed. And if it's not a proper statistical analysis, then fix it. Thousands of undergrad statistics students could explain what needs to be changed. It would also be great to allow numbers nerds like me to get the full list of GPUs, even for those with only a 0.01% share. And as long as I'm making wishes that are unlikely to be fulfilled, please fix all the PC component shortages, especially on the new video cards. Because hey, dreams are free!

Quote:Nvidia’s Ampere arrived to much fanfare last fall before mostly vanishing from store shelves. In the aftermath of the launch, bot-users and resellers bragged about buying as many as 50 cards at a time. This kind of taunting struck a nerve with a lot of people. We know that scalping definitely caused problems for various products, but we haven’t had any idea how big those problems were, until now.

Michael Driscoll, an Oracle Data Engineer, has put together a detailed method of tracking the movement of various products on eBay. He’s published his full data sets and written several reports on what he’s seen across the market these past 6-8 months. He includes data for Nvidia Ampere GPUs, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, AMD CPUs, and AMD’s RDNA2. I’m not going to walk through every article — they’re all quite thorough — but we’ll discuss some of the more interesting findings. He’s also handing out the source code for the data scraper he’s using if anyone wants to tinker with it. All graphs below are his property and work.
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No one is going to argue that scalping is a good thing. Driscoll estimates that as many as 15 percent of consoles might be sold at these high mark-ups. These consoles and other hardware represent thousands of parts that might have gone to happy users at MSRP rather than paying a large premium for the privilege of owning hardware.

But what this also lends credence to is the idea that TSMC or one of TSMC’s downstream partners has been capacity / component constrained. The idea that AMD might have prioritized consoles over PC hardware also seems to have gotten some lift as well, given the huge difference in revenue sales between PS5/Xbox and the rest of the PC industry.

Companies are now guiding that it could be July until the shortages ease. Until they do, unless you get lucky, we recommend checking OEM system builds before pulling the trigger and building your own. This is another one of those times when PC companies may be able to offer you better deals than what you’ll find on Newegg or Amazon.

Quote:Nvidia will now require that companies selling laptops with the latest RTX 30-series graphics cards list total graphics power and clock speeds, the GPU maker told The Verge.

Previously, the company had told Tom's Hardware that "We strongly encourage OEMs" to list this data. Most companies, including Dell, Asus, MSI and more had not included them.

The change should make it easier for people to know what type of performance to expect from a gaming laptop before buying or waiting on third-party reviews to confirm which version of the GPU is being used.

Gigabyte and Asus have begun adding the information. XMG and Schenker, sibling companies that sell primarily in Europe have been more specific since launch, including Max-Q status.

Quote:Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has been rather vocal about his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency lately, and now, the automaker Tesla has purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, according to a new SEC filing. The automaker also stated that it would start accepting Bitcoin payments in the near future, meaning you'll be able to buy a Tesla with just cryptocurrency exchanging hands. Unfortunately, that isn't good news for hardware enthusiasts as it means that demand for other coins, including those mined with GPUs, could intensify, exacerbating the ongoing shortages.
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But, curiously, Tesla's move came right before Elon Musk expressed enthusiasm about Bitcoin and Dogecoin on Twitter, which appears to have led both cryptocurrencies to higher prices. As such, Bitcoin is currently at a staggering price of over $44,000 USD, with Dogecoin moving from half a cent to well above 8 cents per coin, a new record high.

Considering the filing is from January, chances are that the $1.5 billion investment has already surpassed $2 billion in value.

That being said, this isn't great news for PC hardware. As Cryptocurrencies become more expensive, mining crypto becomes more profitable and therefore, miners will be willing to pay higher prices for graphics cards, which will only make the shortage worse than it already is. News just broke that Nvidia's RTX 3000 series GPUs are set for concerning shortages in Q1, and this is likely to only make matters worse.

Quote:When Nvidia launched its RTX 3000 GPUs, the availability of the cards was less than great, with demand far outstripping supply, leading to a shortage. Now a new report suggests the problem is about to get worse.

European hardware retailer Alternate, which operates in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, has spoken with Nvidia about availability and confirmed that, throughout the first quarter, the cards will be even more difficult to come by than before. There are multiple factors at play, including the surge in Ethereum mining, none of them good news.
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The retailer has a waiting list with a first in, first out criteria for placed orders. Your luck will apparently be better with RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 cards, as despite fewer incoming shipments, they aren't nearly as popular and thus have shorter waiting lists. The 3080 and 3060 Ti are in higher demand, still with very limited cards being delivered.
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Alternate goes on to explain that if you had already placed an order previously, your price will remain and you will keep your position in the waiting list. However, prices will be on the rise due to the reduced supply.

Dutch retailer Megekko is also filtering open orders and canceling and crediting those with multiple GPUs per order to try and weed out scalpers.

While this is all information stemming from European retailers, from what we're seeing, the situation is no different in the US. Both continents' products come from the same production lines, and the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3080 also appear to be most popular here. In other words, buckle up, because we're in for an extended bumpy ride.

Quote:The once-solid guidance that this situation would resolve itself by the end of Q1 is looking increasingly shady, and we’re seeing multiple companies already warning that it might be the end of Q2 2021 before things are resolved. By the time the fifth anniversary of Pascal rolls around, we’ll be closing on the point where GPUs have spent more time above MSRP than at or below it over the past five years. Assuming this trend holds through May, we’ll have run higher-than-normal GPU prices for 28 out of the past 60 months.

This kind of sustained price inflation is destroying the idea that the PC market should treat GPU MSRPs as any kind of factual metric of cost. If you can’t buy a GPU at normal price literally half the time, GPUs effectively don’t have a “normal” price. They have an oscillating price that varies depending on other market conditions. Some companies, like Newegg, have set up lotteries to determine who gets to buy video cards in a bid to distribute them more fairly. And there’s no way to blame this on the pandemic — while COVID-19 has snarled factory production globally, GPU availability was tight in 2016, 2017, and early 2018 for reasons that had nothing to do with coronavirus.

Also, fun fact: While this report is specific to Nvidia cards, we can assume that shutdowns will hit availability for every scarce component, to one degree or another. AMD CPU and GPU availability, along with console availability, will get no favors from this.

Assuming AMD’s prediction holds true, we should see slowly improving availability after Q1.

Quote:Members of British Parliament led by Scottish politician Douglas Chapman are currently working to introduce a bill that would ban or limit gaming console and computer component scalping, according to new quotes from Wired and IGN.
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It’s possible, however, that the bill might face more opposition from logistics than from Parliament itself. Regulating scalping runs the risk of fostering government overreach into the acquisition and resale of private property, which limits what exactly Parliament can do to enforce a scalping ban. Even more limited intervention, like setting price maximums on sites like eBay, runs the risk of just forcing scalpers into less-regulated spaces like Craigslist or private forums.

Still, as we wrote about back in December, the scalping situation has gotten bad enough for cyber vigilantes to start popping up on resale sites, seeking to do what websites and governments won’tm by attempting to scam scalpers back. Whatever form it takes, it’s clear that some regulation would likely be welcomed by many consumers.

Quote:A well-known leaker from NVIDIA cards past, Kopite7Kimi, has launched a rumor wherein the previously "indefinitely postponed" RTX 3080 Ti graphics card might see the light of day as early as April. Designed as an NVIDIA response to the price/performance offering from AMD's RX 6900 XT graphics card, the RTX 3080 Ti with an overkill 20 GB GDDR6X was rumored to have been in the works following the AMD launch. However, inventory difficulties related not only to wafer production from Samsung, but also GDDR6X supply from Micron and delays in the logistics channels meant that NVIDIA chose to shelve this graphics card release.

The new, reinterpreted RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is rumored to axe the 20 GB of GDDR6X memory in favor of a more tenable 12 GB - which some might argue is but a slight, but sufficient improvement from the RTX 3080's 10 GB. That memory amount, however, means that the card will have to carry a different, wider, 384-bit memory bus, which should mean improved memory performance, but also increased board costs. The RTX 3080 Ti is now rumored as carrying 80 enabled Streaming Multiprocessors (12 more than the RTX 3080's 68, and 2 less than the fully-enabled chip present in the RTX 3090.

Quote:Nvidia's RTX 3070 is a great GPU, but the RTX 3060 Ti edges so close to it in performance that it has become the more popular card. But between the MSRP's of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, which are supposed to retail at $499 and $699, respectively, there is a big enough gap to squeeze in another card: The alleged RTX 3070 Ti. We've heard of it before, and now it's popping up again.

German retailer Alternate briefly published a product page listing a Lenovo gaming PC containing this graphics card, as spotted by GameStar. Of course, the product page is now down, and Alternate told GameStar that the information was just a bug. A bug, huh? Sure. Pull the other one.

In earlier rumors, the RTX 3070 Ti was said to feature 16 GB of memory, and this new listing shows the same — there's no GDDR6X here, just GDDR6. In fact, we've seen this exact PC before.
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We also don't know when the card will come out. Alternate listed delivery for the Legion T7 34IMZ5 PC as 'Within 2021,' but that leaves quite a big window. We can also reasonably guess that a 3070 Ti will have at least as many GPU cores as the 3070, but fewer cores than the 3080. Anything more is just speculation.

Quote:To date, temperature monitoring tools such as HWiNFO have only been able to display the GPU temperature of Nvidia GPUs as an average of its sensors, but that's about to change. According to Igor Wallossek, who recently got his hands on an unreleased beta of HWiNFO, the temperature and sensor monitoring program's next beta will come with a feature to monitor the Hotspot temperature of Nvidia GPUs.
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That's correct. AMD's new RDNA2 GPUs, which include the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards, already report this information to HWiNFO. But contrary to AMD, Nvidia has been very hush-hush about this information.

Quote:Yesterday, Nvidia announced that the RTX 3060 would limit hashing power when it detected Ethereum mining, but Nvidia was oddly specific about Ethereum. That made us wonder: What about other coins? After all, Ethereum isn't the only crypto coin out there, and new coins and algorithms come out on a regular basis.

As it turns out, we were right to wonder about this. The RTX 3060 implements vBIOS and driver protections to detect when it is mining Ethereum. But as found by YouTuber CryptoLeo, it will still happily mine other coins, as if it has no idea that it's still mining coins at full power... because... well... it doesn't know better.
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Of course, we're all asking ourselves the same question, but the solution isn't quite that simple. Creating a general limiting algorithm for when crypto-mining behavior is detected is harder than one would think for one simple reason: How do you make it distinguish between coin mining and other non-gaming GPU workloads that can look like mining, such as machine learning, cryptography, or graphical work with Adobe products? Maybe that last one is easier, but GPUs are fully programmable for a reason.

As a result, if the Ethereum protocol were to change even slightly, for example, the update to Ethereum 2.0 with the new Proof-of-Stake mining model, the entire mining limiter would likely cease to be useful. But that's still quite a ways away, so the main issue, for now, remains other profitable coins and the risk of someone finding a workaround for the in-vBIOS detection.

We're scratching our heads about how well the measure will be useful to limiting the RTX 3060's appeal to miners. I suppose we'll have to wait and see to find out. The RTX 3060 is slated to launch on the 25th of February for $329 — but we all know it's going to cost a lot more than that, especially if miners do set their sights on it. The Ampere GPUs were already selling out faster than Nvidia could make them before the recent surge in mining profitability, and the underlying problem (not enough supply) isn't going away any time soon.

Quote:News outlet CRN reported that Gigabyte has retired the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G announced back in September of last year. The product page for the graphics card is no longer available, which confirms CRN's report.

Gigabyte's sudden plans to cancel the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G will certainly put its server partners in a tight situation. Although Nvidia has a formidable Ampere compute graphics card in the shape of the A100, many vendors preferred to roll with the GeForce RTX 3090 due to the latter's better price-to-performance ratio. The A100 retails for close to $10,000 while the GeForce RTX 3090 can be found for $1,499 on a good day.
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Now that the GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G has officially reached the end-of-life (EOL) status, vendors will have to look for another viable solution. Luckily, Gigabyte's GeForce RTX 3090 Turbo 24G wasn't the only GeForce RTX 3090 with a blower-design on the market. Asus and MSI also put out similar designs. Heck, even South Korean manufacturer Emtek's GeForce RTX 3090 Blower Edition is a legit alternative if push comes to shove.

Quote:Nvidia has announced that it will take steps to ensure RTX 3060 GPUs wind up in the hands of gamers, not crypto miners. On Thursday, the company said it would launch a new lineup of CMP (Crypto-Mining Processor) cards, while also restricting the maximum performance of the RTX 3060 when mining Ethereum.

RTX 3060 GPUs will only mine Ethereum at 50 percent of their potential hash rate due to driver-level restrictions. According to Nvidia, its new CMP cards will run at full speed. These cards lack video outputs and they offer both lower peak voltage and lower maximum core clocks, in order to improve mining efficiency.
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We’re glad to see Nvidia trying to fix this situation, but it’s not clear how much this is going to help. We should see some improvement in RTX 3060 availability, but GPUs are hard to find right now across the product spectrum, and that means there’s additional upward price pressure on any available GPU, even if we ignore cryptocurrency mining demand.

If TSMC and Samsung are currently capacity-constrained and shipping every chip they can manufacture, then splitting the pile of RTX 3060 GPUs into “CMP” and “GPU” buckets just means there are less chips available to fill demand in both segments. Unmet demand for CMP cards will waterfall into the GPU space, even if GPUs are disfavored for these workloads. Specialized cards might blunt the impact, but it’s doubtful they’ll completely offset it.

If the entire market wasn’t supply constrained, Nvidia would have more options. Well-priced CMP cards could be counted on to divert buyers from the GPU market, and there would be enough inventory to meet demand. With GPUs hard to come by at every price point and both TSMC and Samsung running at maximum production, this looks a bit more like subdividing the same pie to carve out another slice. We’d like to be wrong on this, because the semiconductor market needs all the help it can get. But it’s not clear that limiting the RTX 3060 alone in this fashion will meaningfully improve GPU supplies in and of itself. We’re hopeful this will help at the margins, but only ramping up

Quote:We’re living in a perfect storm for GPU price inflation — cryptocurrency mining is on the rise, as is interest in gaming during the pandemic. There’s also a global semiconductor shortage at the moment. The result: even if you can find a high-end GPU, it’ll probably cost at least twice what it should. Nvidia hopes to combat this with the upcoming RTX 3060, which will have its crypto mining capabilities nerfed. The company has now clarified its plans, saying it won’t make crypto changes to any existing GPUs.
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The fate of future GPU models will probably depend on how the CMP launch goes. The first mining-specific Nvidia cards will launch in the first quarter of the year, with more to follow later. Still, the RTX 3060 is a mid-range model. People buying the top-of-the-line hardware might balk at any mining limits. Still, it’s possible future high-end video cards will have limits on Etherium mining if CMP takes off. That might not be all bad if it means gamers can buy cards at (or at least within spitting distance of) MSRP.

Quote:According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.

According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." This means that essentially, NVIDIA can find any way to cripple the mining hash rate even if you didn't update your driver version. At the same time, according to Kopite7Kimi, we are possibly expecting to see NVIDIA relaunch its existing SKUs under a different ID, which would feature a built-in anti-crypto mining algorithm. What the company does remains to be seen.

Quote:As tweeted by @Harukaze5719, Palit has added one more indication there may be additional (future) RTX 3060 variants. Palit filed listings for new RTX 3060 model names with the NRRA, and one model in particular showcases the RTX 3060 with 6GB of VRAM.
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Of course, this is just a listing for a product name. We've seen listings like this numerous times in the past, where a graphics card manufacturer will pump out a model name, and it never gets used. It may come to fruition, or it may not. We'll have to wait and see where the fate of the 3060 6GB will lie.
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From our own experiences testing 6GB graphics cards like the RTX 2060, we've found that 6GB is about as low as you want to go with a mid-range card. Especially at 4K resolutions, you might have to turn down a couple of settings (like 4K texture packs) in very graphically demanding games to prevent VRAM bottlenecking.
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The card would have to be priced well to make it attractive over the more favorable 12GB offering. Right now, unfortunately, in the world of virtually impossible to buy graphics cards, it's doubtful good prices will even be a thing. Everything from GTX 1050 Ti through RTX 3090 is basically sold out, with extreme scalper prices on eBay. However, from Nvidia's standpoint, a 6GB model does make sense — especially if they are suffering from the video memory shortages that have reportedly plagued GDDR6 (and GDDR6X) production.

As usual, Nvidia won't comment on the existence or potential for a desktop 3060 6GB. Our take is that, given where games are heading and current pricing, it will be a tough sell unless the price is really good (and actually something you can find). The GTX 1060 3GB was in a similar situation a few years back, and we never recommended it without concerns about the lack of VRAM. A 3060 6GB would be the modern equivalent, and at the right price, consumers probably would be okay with the reduced memory capacity. Or, you know, just buy a 3060 laptop.

Quote:Nvidia today announced that Resizable Base Address Register (BAR) support is now available for RTX 3060 graphics cards and RTX 30 Series laptops. That’s earlier than the company anticipated, but it comes with a caveat, because its other desktop GPUs aren’t expected to receive drivers that support the technology until “late March.”
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So what is Resizable BAR? Nvidia explained in today’s announcement that it’s meant to let the CPU  “efficiently access the entire frame buffer” by enabling as-needed transfers of textures, shaders, and geometry that can be processed concurrently rather than queued up. The result: improved performance. Maybe. In a few titles.

Intel’s GM of premium and gaming notebook segments, Fredrik Hamberger, told us that Resizable BAR support could lead to performance gains of 5-10% in some games. Nvidia said that “the performance benefits of Resizable BAR can vary substantially from game to game,” however, and that some titles actually performed worse. Support is also available for AMD CPUs.

This led the company to say that it “will be pre-testing titles and using game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only in games where it has a positive performance impact.” That’s resulted in RTX cards supporting just eight titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Red Dead Redemption 2, with the initial driver that was released today.

Nvidia said it plans to expand Resizable BAR support to additional games when it rolls the feature out to more of its 30-series graphics cards next month. For now, though, it seems like the company’s support for the technology will only affect a very small portion of its customers. Let’s see if it raises the (resizable) bar later on.

Quote:There's perhaps some light at the end of the tunnel, though — faint and distant light, but these things can change quickly. After hitting a peak price of over $58,000 for Bitcoin and $2,000 for Ethereum, both have dropped a bit in the past few days. Mining profits from an RTX 3060 Ti now sit at an estimated $5.67 per day, which means it would take 213 days of 24/7 mining to break even at current rates, and the RTX 3080 has an estimated $8.84 per day in profits (after power), so it would require 232 days to reach the break even point (based on eBay's median pricing for the past week).

Ethereum difficulty continues to rise as well — it went up 5% in the past week — which means every GPU used for mining will make proportionately less money. What would really help GPU prices most is a big drop in cryptocurrency valuations, which has happened a bit this past week, but there's a long way to go. Bitcoin dipped by 5.4% over the past week, and Ethereum dropped 14.4% (that's from one week ago, not from the all-time high during that time frame). If both trends continue, sometime in the next month or two miners would likely stop investing in more hardware.

Meanwhile, Nvidia just announced that it made "$100 to $300 million" in estimated sales to cryptocurrency miners just in its last quarter. Let's be honest: It was probably a lot higher. Actually, that was for Q4 2020, so perhaps not, but miner sales in Q1 2021 probably account for at least half of all GPUs sold. That's just a guess, but given the massive spike in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices, it wouldn't be at all surprising. At least the new RTX 3060 12GB isn't a particularly attractive mining option, though that didn't stop it from selling out.

Quote:Unlike the previous Ampere GPUs, Nvidia won't offer an RTX 3060 Founders Edition, so we're looking at a third-party card. Nvidia shipped us the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC for this launch review, a reasonably compact and relatively unassuming card. There's no metal (or even plastic) backplate, no RGB lighting, and two custom-sized 87mm fans for cooling with a 2.0-slot form factor. The card measures 202x110x38mm and weighs 653g, which is quite the change of pace compared to the other third-party Ampere cards we've reviewed so far.
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Overall, the 3060 ended up 20% slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, and 27% slower than the RTX 3070. That's a bigger drop as you go down the GPU hierarchy, giving you proportionally less performance for your money — not a good thing. The RTX 3060 is also just 20% faster than the RTX 2060, and 7% faster than the RTX 2060 Super. Of course, 1080p is a low hurdle to clear and CPU bottlenecks come into play. Let's quickly go through the individual 1080p game charts.
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Increasing the resolution to 1440p doesn't radically alter the overall relative standing of the RTX 3060. Actual performance drops by 25%, and it's now 22% slower than the 3060 Ti on average, but it's also 24% faster than the RTX 2060 and 8% faster than the 2060 Super. Factory overclocked cards will do a bit better, but even though the card technically has 3584 GPU cores, compared to Turing it behaves more like a card with about 35% fewer cores (due to the shared FP32/INT32 cores).
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4K gaming proved to be a bit much for the RTX 3060, at least if you're hoping for 60 fps gameplay. Some games can get there, especially if you're willing to drop the settings a notch or two, but at our Ultra settings only two games in our suite managed smooth framerates: Forza Horizon 4 and Strange Brigade — neither of which are particularly demanding. A few others came close to 60 and should be fine with a G-Sync compatible monitor, but several games struggled to stay above 30 fps, and both games with ray tracing enabled (but no DLSS) dropped well below 30.

The 3060 fell 23% behind the 3060 Ti, but it also beat the 2060 by 32% — a bit of a pyrrhic victory, considering the actual fps, but having double the VRAM certainly helped. If you're hoping to game at 4K native, we recommend stepping up to a more potent graphics card. Or you could do what the latest consoles do and shoot for 30 fps with dynamic resolution scaling. Basically, the RTX 3060 looks to be roughly the same level of performance as the PS5 GPU.
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We can't predict the future, but all we have to do is look at current resellers and places like eBay to know that, no matter what Nvidia does to hinder mining performance, the GeForce RTX 3060 is going to sell out. You basically can't buy any RTX 30-series or 20-series card on Newegg right now at less than double the original launch prices. The same goes for AMD's RX 5000 and RX 6000 series cards, and even the GTX 16-series GPUs. If you can find an RTX 3060 on sale today for less than $400, grab it fast — heck, buying one for $500 would still be a better deal than the $800 RTX 2060 Supers we've seen floating around.

Sadly, this is likely to be yet another product that won't be able to meet the demand for it any time soon. We hope we're wrong, we really do. But hope doesn't get you a shiny new graphics card.

Quote:Getting a new GPU is almost impossible right now, with prices skyrocketing as supply continues to lag demand. Nvidia has already announced some steps to separate cryptocurrency applications into a new product category, and it’s even got a new gaming GPU that blocks high-speed crypto mining. During the company’s recent earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress hinted that more gaming GPU restrictions could be coming.
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In discussing the shortage, Kress noted that Nvidia has limited hash rates on GPUs “starting with the 3060.” That strongly implies future GPUs will come with similar restrictions, and the company did go out of its way recently to stress that it would not nerf any existing video cards. Nvidia’s desire to keep the gaming and mining markets separate supports the idea future cards will have mining limits, as stressed by CEO Jensen Huang. “I think proof of work is going to be around for a bit,” he said, referring to the workloads that miners run to unlock new digital money. “We developed CMP for this very reason.”

It plans to ship approximately 15 million CMP cards for industrial miners in the first quarter of the year. That might help get GPUs back on store shelves for gamers, but the trend of splitting mining and gaming might not appeal to everyone. Hopefully, Nvidia leaves at least some product lines alone — if you’re spending big on a flagship GPU, it’s reasonable to expect it to be unencumbered by artificial restrictions of any kind.

Quote:At least on paper, the RTX 3090 Hall of Fame Extreme is one of the most powerful graphics cards you can buy today. But for some people, that isn't enough. A hardware reviewer in China has managed to install a custom BIOS for the RTX 3090 HOF with a 1,000 watt power limit.
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With the new 1,000W BIOS installed, and a hefty overclock the RTX 3090 HOF reached a peak power consumption of a whopping 630W. But the extra 200W of power resulted in the beefy triple-fan cooler being completely overwhelmed and forced the GPU to sit at 96 degrees Celsius, which is the card's maximum temperature limit before it will shut down to prevent damage. However, the core clocks were very stable at 2,010 MHz.

This a terrible gain from an efficiency perspective; An extra 200 MHz with a whopping 200 watts more power consumption is horrendously bad. Most Nvidia GPUs can do this type of overclocking with just a slight boost to wattage.

But, the main problem is the card's ridiculously high temperatures with the 1,000 W BIOS in play. Nvidia GPUs are known to lose clock speed quite rapidly once you reach significantly high temperatures. If this RTX 3090 was equipped with a beefy liquid cooling solution (or an LN2 pot) we would probably see higher frequencies than this and a better efficiency curve.
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The reviewer also mentioned there are some issues with the 1,000 W BIOS that could also be hindering the card's performance, so take that into account as well.

Quote:A well-known leaker with a stellar track record believes that Nvidia is planning to extend its Ethereum mining limiter, currently found in the RTX 3060 12GB, into the rumored RTX 3080 Ti. VideoCardz has also confirmed that Nvidia informed AIB partners that the mining limiter would be coming to the RTX 3080 Ti, making rumors for the existence of the RTX 3080 Ti even more likely.
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But if an RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti are slated to come out later this year, Nvidia could be killing off the vanilla RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 to make way for the more powerful SKUs. If so, it wouldn't make much sense to go through all the extra effort of nerfing hash rates on the older Ampere GPUs (besides the 3060 TI) if they are to be discontinued anyway.

We'll have to see how this plays out in the future. As of right now, you can make a decent amount of money on the RTX 3060 12GB despite having the mining limiter in place. If Nvidia begins having supply issues with its mining cards and miners start getting desperate, there's a good chance they will still buy any RTX 30-series GPU regardless.

Quote:As we head deeper into March, there’s no relief in sight from the ongoing video card shortage. In fact, Nvidia GPU prices are getting worse, at least in the case of the RTX 3080.

This data comes from Michael Driscoll, the same individual who provided analytics on the impact of scalpers on console, CPU, and GPU markets a few months ago. Driscoll spoke with PCMag and provided our sister site with an update on his findings. GPU prices skyrocketed in February across the entire Ampere family, and while they’re trending back downwards now, they’re still elevated far above where they were in January and during 2020:
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A great many cards have sold for between $1,100 and $2,500. When they’ll actually get back to normal is still a complete unknown. Nvidia has attempted to take steps to limit the appeals of newer GPUs for cryptocurrency mining but has also said that cryptocurrency-related sales only accounted for ~$300M out of more than $5B in total revenue last quarter. Then again, Nvidia has historically had a problem estimating how many of its GPUs are sold for crypto mining. The 2020 lawsuit against Nvidia alleging that it deliberately hid this information is still winding its way through the court system.

If Nvidia can alleviate these shortages and the situation begins to improve, we might see normal-ish conditions in the market by mid-year. The chip shortage could persist until the end of 2021 in some segments, but we don’t have insight into which ones or for how long. It’s still possible to get lucky and snag good deals — I’ve seen the Ryzen 7 5800X in stock at Amazon twice in the past 36 hours — but there’s no way of predicting whether you’ll be able to do so.

Right now, it looks like 2021 will be one of the all-time worst years to attempt to build or buy a new computer.