Nvidia Proved That This is the Best Time to Upgrade your PC!

Nvidia went absolutely swinging with their new lineup reveals, and have given multiple reasons why this might be the perfect time to upgrade, as the new cards will not only be actually affordable and much better than the highest-end RTX2080ti on the market, but will come with innovative features that really make use of the new architecture.

 

There were three different cards revealed at the event today, an RTX 3070, an RTX 3080 and an RTX 3090. The most impressive thing with all these is that they are all more powerful than an RTX 2080ti which is currently the best card you can buy for gaming. What is even better is the pricing, meaning that you will be able to get a newer gen card up to 50% cheaper than what an RTX card costs today. Let’s start by taking a look at the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080:

Starting at only $499 and still faster than a 2080 TI, compared to the current Amazon price tag of $1200 for an RTX 2080ti, the cards will deliver up to 50% in saving whilst giving you more power than arguably the best card on the market currently.

Nvidia’s new flagship card on the other hand will see up to 2x performance improvement when compared to a RTX 2080, whilst costing the same. It will be even more powerful than the 2080 TI when compared to the 3070’s upgrade, coming with a whopping 238 Tensor Cores.

It is even more impressive when you see that compared to a 2080ti, whose performance was actually below a 1080ti on that chart with RTX and DLSS on, the 3080 passes 60 fps at 4K, showing some substantial gain. This means that 4K gaming is finally going to be much more realistically achievable at 60 FPS, exceeding the performance of both Xbox Series X and PS5 by a long shot. Of course, it’s worth considering that a 3080 alone will cost more than the entire price of a console, making them absolute beasts in their own right and range.

If for some reason you still crave much more power, then you will have the option to get the new TITAN of today, an RTX 3090, which is a huge card that basically looks to have eaten two 3080s for breakfast, even giving double the performance. However, this isn’t really aimed at your regular or even hardcore gamers to an extent, but enthusiasts instead.

This means that you should only really consider it if you are working on technology that requires supercomputer levels of juice or are building a dedicated simulation rig, such as one for Flight Simulators, Racing Rigs and more. I personally won’t recommend this card as it is overkill and games won’t really see the full benefits from it. This also brings some valid points regarding testing and the software bottleneck, however, we will come back to that in a bit as before that, let’s talk about some of the other non-FPS benefits to the cards.

More than gaming; an INFINITE PLAYGROUND

Other than gaming, Nvidia will be introducing a slew of new RTX tech that will really help both creators, developers and the general gamers.

These range from Deep Learning improvements bringing us more physics and simulation advancement, all the way to studio optimisation, allowing streamers to replace background without the need for a greenscreen or cancel background noise in an impressive manner that was demonstrated by a streamer blocking the background noises of his girlfriend operating a loud hairblower, which was magically gone at the flick of a switch.

Here are some of the other advantages that will be available to all RTX users:

All in all, it is an exciting time to be a PC gamer, with a lot of power at a much affordable price than the last-gen. In my opinion if you haven’t upgraded since Maxwell cards (900 series), and have been thinking about an upgrade, this is absolutely the perfect time, where the tech is a bit more tested and less prototypical, which makes it cheaper as well.

Not to mention with the insane power gains, and 4K gaming capabilities over a behemoth such as RTX 2080ti, it definitely seems to be a value for money. However, if you are indeed upgrading from a Maxwell card, chances are that it has been a good few years, for which I would recommend you pay attention the following:

• Is your PSU nearing its 5 year recommended limit
• Is your CPU 8 Core/16 threads ready for the true next gen games
• Does your motherboard support 8 core cpu design or the new cards?

These are important questions before you think about upgrading, as there may be some bottlenecking involved. I am in the same boat as above and need to figure out what I need to upgrade before I change. Whilst on paper it would mean upgrading my motherboard, PSU and CPU, I have to wait and see what the software bottlenecks and testing results would be.

 

Now, this is where we come back to the question of software limitations I struck before. The thing is, if you are on an RTX 20xx series of cards, it might not be worth upgrading at all, if you mainly only play at 1440p or below, as the software (games) might not really be optimised as well to make good use of all the features. Bad optimisation is always a possibility with a lot of games.

Of course, if you have a much older card, than that isn’t really an obstacle, however, in that case like me I would recommend that you wait for the launch and wait for tech specialists such as Digital Foundry and Linus Tech to run the card through their test kits. A test kit is basically a PC without a case where you could easily swap between parts.

However, with pretty much all future triple-A titles planning to make Ray Tracing a staple of their experience, with DLSS paving the way for performance on PC, making games easily playable at 4K, there really isn’t a question about upgrade at this point if you don’t have a ray-tracing capable card, and intend to play most major games in the next few years.

You will be more easily able to see how much of a bottleneck an older 4 core CPU might become with some of these tests as they tend to test a lot of different cases. I have a feeling it will be barely noticeable for the next few years but at one point it might become a necessity to upgrade to an 8 core CPU, especially with the next-gen console architecture using similar features.

 

Still, it is worth noting that the way the console CPUs work is different than the PC ones, and it might take a good while before devs fully start utilising that properly, as not every company is going to freely push the boundaries of the PC leaving the console versions behind. Unless you are the masters of tech CDPR of course!

But of course, this is true for all upgrades. as it’s always worth researching and waiting to find the optimal setup. There isn’t much time left until the launch of the cards, and we ourselves hope to get at least the 3080 soon after launch, letting us give you much better PC reviews down the line. We will also try and be on the lookout for any benchmarks and keep you updated.

Are you planning to upgrade your card, and is there a particular game you hope to be able to run at its best? Let us know in the comments below or give us a shout on Twitter.