NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 explained: What you need to know about the release date, price, specs, features and pre-order info


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The NVIDIA RTX 3080 has been announced as part of NVIDIA's new ‘30 Series’ of graphics cards, which will succeed the line of 2080, 2070, and other cards that have been on the market since 2018.

NVIDIA held a GeForce event on September 1 at 5 PM BST (9 AM PT), where we learnt all about the 3070, 3080 and 3090.

The 3080Ti was touted as the flagship of the three cards, even though the 3090 was described as a 'GRPG' in graphics and power.

We now know the pricing, the availability, and what the 3080 is capable of. Read on to find out all the details.

NVIDIA RTX 3080 Release Date

NVIDIA began the hype-train with a tweet on the 10th August, with subsequent updates to the profile hinting towards an announcement on the 1st September.

Now that the event has passed, we now know that the release date is September 17th.

The event featured an address by NVIDIA's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. During the event, Huang touted that this was a 'massive generational leap', and he wasn't wrong.

It's directly competing against the upcoming AMD RDNA2 GPU, and it looks to take on all the 4K games at 120FPS.

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NVIDIA RTX 3080 Price

The ‘20 Series’ back in 2018 began with the 2080 card and subsequently different levels of the graphics cards being released over the next 12 months after. It began with a price of $699, so it won’t be a stretch to see the 3080Ti at around the same price.

But at the event on September 1st, the price was unveiled at $699, while offering double the power of the 2080Ti. This huge, and undercuts most of AMD's current graphics cards.

If you’re upgrading from anything that’s less than the ‘1000’ series, you can probably expect 60FPS on a 1440P resolution with this card.

The new 'Ampere' architecture looks to blow many games out of the water, and have it ready for the oncoming games to come in the next six months.

Alongside the graphics card, anybody who buys an RTX 3080 from selected retailers until October 29 will also get a free copy of Watch Dogs Legion and a year's subscription to GeForce Now.

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NVIDIA RTX 3080 Pre-Order

The NVIDIA website has a nice big product page for the 3080, and you can click here to check it out.

You can't quite order one yet, even though that release date isn't very far off. But what you can do is sign up for notifications to learn when the 3080 does become available!

NVIDIA RTX 3080 Specs

The ‘30 Series’ will be based on the ‘Ampere’ architecture, which means this one is gonna be an absolute beast. Here's what we know, through official channels, about the 3080 specs...

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Take a look - this is what you're getting with the 3080!
NVIDIA GeForce RTX comparison
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And this is how it compares to the wider 30 range - interesting stuff!

NVIDIA RTX 3080 features

Last year, the demo of ‘Quake II RTX’ showed ray-tracing in all its first-gen glory, so one can only imagine just how good the rendering of the ‘3080’ will be.

Alongside this, expect the ‘3080’ and other cards in the ‘30 Series’ to have huge heaps of VRAM to handle the 4K textures and other features that it will be rendering at 60FPS and even-higher frame rates.

The ‘3080’ is rumoured to have 12GB of onboard Video Memory, a huge amount that will be able to handle the amount of textures, ray-tracing and landscape of levels, alongside VR games that are only going to be growing in scope after the success of ‘Half-Life: Alyx’.

Alongside other rumours that the ‘3080’ will be approximately 40% faster than the current ‘2070 Super’ with 21 teraflops of performance from the architecture, you are going to have a graphics card that can easily compete with the Series X and PlayStation 5. With that easily leap-frogging the GPU of the Series X, it’s a GPU that will future-proof your PC for at least the next eighteen months...

READ MORE:Fortnite is turning on RTX and DLSS

NVIDIA RTX 3080 stock shortages

NVIDIA opted not to have a traditional pre-order period for the RTX 3080, instead opening orders on the day of release. Since September, however, the product has been in high demand, leading to stock shortages across many retail outlets.

Speaking in a Q&A covered by Tom's Hardware, originally intended to be about the recent GTC announcements, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, gave an insight into the stock situation of the RTX 3080 and 3090 cards.

"The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue," Huang stated. " "The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected, and we expected really a lot."

"Retailers will tell you they haven't seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff."

"I appreciate it very much, I just don't think there's a real problem to solve. It's a phenomenon to observe. It's just a phenomenon."

Speaking on when stock would be more widely available, Huang said: "I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," citing the "double-whammy" of release day orders combined with the Holiday season as causing such unprecedented demand.

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