MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio 24 GB GDDR6X Graphics Card Review – The Real Ampere Flagship!

MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio 24 GB GDDR6X Graphics Card Review – The Real Ampere Flagship!

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Keeping their tradition alive of launching a new GeForce graphics architecture every two years, this year, NVIDIA introduces its Ampere GPU. The Ampere GPU is built upon the foundation set by Turing. Termed as its biggest generational leap, the NVIDIA Ampere GPUs excel previous generations at everything.

The Ampere GPU architecture has a lot to be talked about in this review, but so does the new RTX lineup. The Ampere lineup offers faster shader performance, faster ray tracing performance, and faster AI performance. Built on a brand new process node and featuring an architecture designed from the ground up, Ampere is a killer product with lots of numbers to talk about.

The fundamental of Ampere was to take everything NVIDIA learned with its Turing architecture and not only refine it but to use its DNA to form a product in a completely new performance category. Tall claims were made by NVIDIA when they introduced its Ampere lineup earlier this month & we will be finding out whether NVIDIA hit all the ticks with its Ampere architecture as this review will be your guiding path to see what makes Ampere and how it performs against its predecessors.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Gaming Graphics Cards – The Biggest GPU Performance Leap in Recent History

Turing wasn’t just any graphics core, it was the graphics core that was to become the foundation of future GPUs. The future is realized now with next-generation consoles going deep in talks about ray tracing and AI-assisted super-sampling techniques. NVIDIA had a head start with Turing and its Ampere generation will only do things infinitely times better.

The Ampere GPU does many traditional things which we would expect from a GPU, but at the same time, also breaks the barrier when it comes to untraditional GPU operations. Just to sum up some features:

  • New Streaming Multiprocessor (SM)
  • New Turing Tensor Cores
  • New Real-Time Ray Tracing Acceleration
  • New Shading Enhancements
  • New Deep Learning Features For Graphics & Inference
  • New GDDR6X High-Performance Memory Subsystem
  • New 2nd Generation NVLINK Interconnect
  • New HDMI 2.1 Display Engine & Next-Gen NVENC/NVDEC

The technologies mentioned above are some of the main building blocks of the Ampere GPU, but there’s more within the graphics core itself which we will talk about in detail so let’s get started.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Pricing Per Segment

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series is made up of a diverse portfolio of graphics cards. Currently, you will only be limited to the higher-end configurations starting at $499 US for the GeForce RTX 3070, $699 US for the GeForce RTX 3080, and $1499 US for the GeForce RTX 3090. NVIDIA themselves call the GeForce RTX 3080 as the flagship graphics card and not the GeForce RTX 3090.

The RTX 3080 & RTX 3070 are both priced well and in-line with their predecessors but the GeForce RTX 3090 goes all out with a price of $1499 US. NVIDIA calls the GeForce RTX 3090 as the “BFGPU” and as per the terminology, it seems like this is a new marketing name for the Titan graphics card. It is likely that we could see a Titan based card under the Quadro branding with faster specs out of the box but the GeForce RTX 3090 is purely a gaming graphics card first with all the horsepower for intense professional and workstation workloads.

With that said, the GeForce RTX 3080 replaces the RTX 2080 SUPER at the same price point and the GeForce RTX 3070 replaces the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER at the same price point. Given this trend, we might see the more mainstream variants cost just as much as their RTX 20 SUPER series cards but with a higher performance out of the box.

NVIDIA GeForce GPU Segment/Tier Prices

Graphics Segment 2014-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018 2018-2019 2019-2020 2020-2021
Titan Tier Titan X (Maxwell) Titan X (Pascal) Titan Xp (Pascal) Titan V (Volta) Titan RTX (Turing) TBA
Price $999 US $1199 US $1199 US $2999 US $2499 US TBA
Ultra Enthusiast Tier GeForce GTX 980 Ti GeForce GTX 980 Ti GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GeForce RTX 3090
Price $649 US $649 US $699 US $999 US $999 US $1499 US
Enthusiast Tier GeForce GTX 980 GeForce GTX 1080 GeForce GTX 1080 GeForce RTX 2080 GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GeForce RTX 3080
Price $549 US $549 US $549 US $699 US $699 US $699 US
High-End Tier GeForce GTX 970 GeForce GTX 1070 GeForce GTX 1070 GeForce RTX 2070 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER GeForce RTX 3070
Price $329 US $379 US $379 US $499 US $499 US $499
Mainstream Tier GeForce GTX 960 GeForce GTX 1060 GeForce GTX 1060 GeForce GTX 1060 GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
GeForce RTX 2060
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER
GeForce GTX 1660
TBA
Price $199 US $249 US $249 US $249 US $399 US
$349 US
$279 US
$229 US
$219 US
TBA
Entry Tier GTX 750 Ti
GTX 750
GTX 950 GTX 1050 Ti
GTX 1050
GTX 1050 Ti
GTX 1050
GTX 1650 SUPER
GTX 1650
TBA
Price $149 US
$119 US
$149 US $139 US
$109 US
$139 US
$109 US
$159 US
$149 US
TBA

In addition to the specs/price update, NVIDIA’s RTX technologies are being widely adopted major game engines and APIs such as Microsft DirectX (DXR), Vulkan, Unreal Engine, Unity, and Frostbite. While there were only three RTX titles around the launch of the RTX 20 series cards, NVIDIA now has at least 28 titles that utilize their RTX feature set to offer real-time ray tracing with more coming soon.

In addition to that, with the upcoming consoles confirmed to feature ray tracing, developers can also make use of the RTX technology to fine-tune future games for the GeForce RTX hardware. Currently, NVIDIA has 13 game engines that are leveraging their RTX technologies for use in their upcoming and existing games while both Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs are part of the RTX ecosystem on the PC platform.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio. The Gaming X Trio comes in at a $100 US premium over the reference MSRP with a price of $1589 US. At this price, you get a triple-fan cooling solution and a factory overclock out of the box. Let’s find out how well the GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio performs compared to the last-generation Gaming X Trio RTX 2080.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Graphics Card

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 is a force to be reckoned with. It takes the throne of the fastest PC gaming graphics card with nothing coming even close to it. It’s surprisingly much faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which is its Turing based predecessor but just being fast isn’t enough for a card of this scale or price. The GeForce RTX 3090 carries more cores, more than 2x the memory, higher performance efficiency, and also carries next-generation ray-tracing and tensor cores that make this a truly next-generation graphics card.

NVIDIA designed the GeForce RTX 3090 not just for any gamer but all gamers who want to have the best graphics performance at hand to power the next-generation of AAA gaming titles with superb visuals and insane fluidity. It’s not just the FPS that matters these days, its visuals, and a smoother frame rate too and this is exactly what the GeForce RTX 30 series is made to excel at. There’s a lot to talk about regarding NVIDIA’s flagship Ampere gaming graphics cards so let’s start off with the specifications.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Graphics Card Specifications – GA102 GPU & 10 GB GDDR6X Memory

At the heart of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card lies the GA102 GPU. The GA102 is one of the many Ampere GPUs that we will be getting on the gaming segment. The GA102 GPU is the fastest gaming GPU that NVIDIA has produced. The GPU is based on Samsung’s 8nm custom process node designed specifically for NVIDIA and features a total of 28 Billion transistors. It measures at 628mm2 which makes it the 2nd biggest gaming GPU ever produced right below the Turing TU102 GPU.

The new shader core on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture is 2.7x faster, the new RT cores are 1.7x faster while the new Tensor cores are up to 2.7x faster than the previous generation Turing GPUs. The 2nd Generation RT core delivers dedicated hardware-accelerated ray-tracing performance & features twice the ray/triangles intersection with concurrent RT graphics and compute operations.

For the GeForce RTX 3090, NVIDIA has enabled a total of 82 SM units on its flagship which results in a total of 10496 CUDA cores. In addition to the CUDA cores, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 also comes packed with next-generation RT (Ray-Tracing) cores, Tensor cores, and brand new SM or streaming multi-processor units.

In terms of memory, the GeForce RTX 3090 takes a big step ahead, featuring more than twice the memory than the RTX 2080 Ti. The flagship comes packed with 24 GB of memory and that too the next-generation GDDR6X design. With Micron’s latest and greatest graphics memory dies, the RTX 3090 can deliver a bandwidth that almost hits 1 TB/s. The GeForce RTX 3090 comes with 24 GB of GDDR6X memory at speeds of 19.5 Gbps. That along with a full uncut bus interface of 384-bit will deliver a cumulative bandwidth of 936 Gbps.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series ‘Ampere’ Graphics Card Specifications:

Graphics Card Name NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
GPU Name Ampere GA104-200 Ampere GA104-300 Ampere GA102-200 Ampere GA102-300
Process Node Samsung 8nm Samsung 8nm Samsung 8nm Samsung 8nm
Die Size 395.2mm2 395.2mm2 628.4mm2 628.4mm2
Transistors 17.4 Billion 17.4 Billion 28 Billion 28 Billion
CUDA Cores 4864 5888 8704 10496
TMUs / ROPs TBA TBA 272 / 96 TBA
Tensor / RT Cores 152 / 38 184 / 46 272 / 68 328 / 82
Base Clock TBA 1500 MHz 1440 MHz 1400 MHz
Boost Clock TBA 1730 MHz 1710 MHz 1700 MHz
FP32 Compute TBA 20 TFLOPs 30 TFLOPs 36 TFLOPs
RT TFLOPs TBA 40 TFLOPs 58 TFLOPs 69 TFLOPs
Tensor-TOPs TBA 163 TOPs 238 TOPs 285 TOPs
Memory Capacity 8 GB GDDR6 8/16 GB GDDR6 10/20 GB GDDR6X 24 GB GDDR6X
Memory Bus 256-bit 256-bit 320-bit 384-bit
Memory Speed 14 Gbps 14 Gbps 19 Gbps 19.5 Gbps
Bandwidth 448 Gbps 448 Gbps 760 Gbps 936 Gbps
TDP 180W? 220W 320W 350W
Price (MSRP / FE) $399 US? $499 US $699 US $1499 US
Launch (Availability) October 2020 15th October 17th September 24th September

In case you want to read our full NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture deep dive and GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition review, head over to this link.

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