Consider This Before Ordering RTX 30 Series
Competition is Around the Corner
Now that the dust has settled after what to many was a shocking announcement from NVIDIA last week, we can look at the RTX 30 Series with a clear mind… sort of. What was so shocking about last week’s announcement wasn’t the new GPU lineup, rather that NVIDIA actually went down in price year over year for their flagship line. This struck a nerve with many newly minted RTX 20 Series owners who just paid $1200 for a 2080 Ti that could have had the same performance for $500 with the new 3070. At least according to NVIDIA.
We’ve seen these claims before, double the performance for a fraction of the cost, sounds great right? The only problem with these claims is that the data shown thus far has either been provided by or cleared by NVIDIA. Is it all a sham then? Well yes and no. All marketing is intended to make a company look as good as possible and no company is innocent of stretching the truth. That being said, there are plenty of reasons to order one and plenty more why you shouldn’t. Here’s what you need to consider if you are trying to decide whether or not to order on day one.
Do you really need it?
Look I know, I’m a PC gamer too I get it. I myself am guilty of buying things that would be considered superfluous to most, but it just makes me feel good. However, if you just bought a 20 Series card, modern games aren’t going to run away from you anytime soon. We see it today with the headroom these cards have in game benchmarks. They are spitting out so many frames your monitor’s refresh rate might not even be able to keep up, not to mention at resolutions nobody is complaining about. In my opinion anything 2070 Super and up is going have the legs for a premium gaming experience for at least two more years, but what if you’re new to PC gaming?
If that’s the case, you have chosen the perfect time to say no to consoles. With the RTX 30 Series, an entry level premium experience that will make any next-gen console sweat can be had with the 3070. You can build a great PC around the 3070 that will be sub-$1500 and have a clear upgrade path for future upgrades. If NVIDIA’s claims about the 3070 are true of 2080Ti performance, the same PC build last month would’ve cost over $2000.
How Much is Too Much?
I already hear those out there mad I’m trying to sway you to be responsible with your money and that’s okay because you’re probably a future 3080 or 3090 owner without question – but which one?
If your answer to that was 3090, please actually listen to NVIDIA’s marketing here. Jensen Huang was upfront about the 3080 replacing the 2080 Ti as their new gaming flagship and went on to explain that the 3090 was created for the RTX Titan customer. If you are thinking of buying it for future proofing at least consider more GPU’s will undoubtedly come out that will run 4K games at higher frame rates for less than the current cost of a 3090.
If you want to logically future proof your system, the 3080 seems to be your best bet. For example, even a 2080 Ti does not run all games great at 4K. What NVIDIA has shown us about the 3080 seems to bring great 4K gaming at high frame rates. However, all that 4K goodness comes with the massive caveat that it only really works well if the game supports DLSS. Hopefully more developers will utilize this tech, but it remains to be seen if the same generational jumps are present for games that do not support DLSS. For that answer, we’ll have to wait to hear from independent reviewers.
Competition is Around the Corner
Competition in all industries is good for consumers. It brings prices down and pushes companies to one-up each other to win your hard earned dollar. The computer graphics industry has been pretty one sided for at least the past two generations with NVIDIA owning the show. Lisa Sue has made great strides against Intel’s CPU dominance with AMD’s introduction of Ryzen, but their Radeon division has yet to prove themselves in the same way. Just today AMD announced that we can expect to see more on October 18th, so I’m reserving judgement on RDNA2 until then.
New kid on the block Intel will soon join the fight albeit begrudgingly. They’ve had to deal with mounting pressures from Apple switching to their own custom silicon, Microsoft continuing their ARM optimizations with Windows, and AMD outshining them in price to performance ratio with both desktops and laptops. At this point, Intel is in dire need diversify revenue because it is clear that their CPU business will soon shrink. I wouldn’t expect Intel to show up and decimate AMD and NVIDIA on their first try, but we can at least hope they put the pressure on the low end where prices are usually most competitive.
Give it to me straight
There’s a lot to consider if you want to order a RTX 30 Series card, but in short it goes like this:
- Already have a 20 Series? Hold on a bit to see if prices come down from competition.
- New to PC Gaming and want a premium build? Go for a 3070 and you can easily build a sub $1500 PC that’ll hang with the best $2000 pre-builts.
- Already a PC Gamer and looking for a sweet upgrade? The 3080 is right for you and will be for years to come.
- Want to burn $1400 and play games at 8K? Sure, you can buy a 3090. You know what, why not two since it’s the only card that still supports SLI.
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