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As if you forgot, right? Today, the real next generation in gaming begins, with the release of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 as the first in the desktop Ampere architecture.

Need a reminder of just how ridiculous and powerful the RTX 3080 is? Here's some specs:

GEFORCE RTX 3080
NVIDIA CUDA® Cores 8704
Boost Clock (GHz) 1.71
Standard Memory Config 10 GB GDDR6X
Memory Interface Width 320-bit
Ray Tracing Cores 2nd Generation
Tensor Cores 3rd Generation
Maximum GPU Temperature (in C) 93
Graphics Card Power (W) 320
Recommended System Power (W) (2) 750
Supplementary Power Connectors 2x PCIe 8-pin

Additional details: they will support the latest Vulkan, OpenGL 4.6, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4a, HDCP 2.3, PCI Express 4 and support for the AV1 codec.

Stock is expected to be quite limited, especially since they did no pre-ordering and stores will likely sell out quite quickly. Even so, here's a few places where you might be able to grab one. Some of the sites are under quite a heavy load too due to high traffic, so prepare to wait a bit. I've seen plenty of "website not available" issues today while waiting to get links.

UK

USA

Feel free to comment with more and we can add them in.

Driver Support

Along with the release, NVIDIA also put out a brand new Linux driver with 455.23.04. This is a Beta driver, so there may be some rough edges they still need to iron out. It brings in support for the RTX 3080, RTX 3090 and the MX450.

On top of new GPU support, it also has a bunch of fixes and improvements including support for device-local VkMemoryType, which NVIDIA said can boost performance with DiRT Rally 2.0, DOOM: Eternal and World of Warcraft with DXVK and Steam Play. Red Dead Redemption 2 with Steam Play should also see a bug fix that was causing excessive CPU use.

The VDPAU driver also expanded with support for decoding VP9 10- and 12-bit bitstreams, although it doesn't support 10- and 12-bit video surfaces yet. NVIDIA also updated Base Mosaic support on GeForce to allow a maximum of five simultaneous displays, rather than three. For PRIME users, there's also some great sounding fixes included too so you should see a smoother experience there.

Some bits were removed for SLI too like "SFR", "AFR", and "AA" modes but SLI Mosaic, Base Mosaic, GL_NV_gpu_multicast, and GLX_NV_multigpu_context are still supported. There's also plenty of other bug fixes.

What's next?

Today is only the start, with the RTX 3090 going up on September 24 and the RTX 3070 later in October. There's also been a leak (as always) of a RTX 3060 Ti which is also due to arrive in October. Based on the leak the upcoming RTX 3060 Ti will have 4864 CUDA cores, 8GB GDDR6 (no X) memory clocked at 14Gbps with a memory bandwidth of 447Gbps which means even the 3060 is going to kick-butt.

Are you going for Ampere, sticking with what you have or waiting on the upcoming AMD RDNA 2 announcements? Do let us know in the comments.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Nibelheim Sep 17, 2020
Time to a new config
CatKiller Sep 17, 2020
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Quoting: peta77So no reason for me to even think about replacing my 2080Ti. If there'd be a card with same performance & memory and much lower power demands ( -> less heat / noise produced ), I might think about a replacement.

It depends where your bottleneck is with your 2080 Ti. In many ways, the 3070 is going to perform better, if the bottleneck is compute speed rather than VRAM.

While the 2080 Ti has a nominal 250 W TDP, the power cap is configurable with nvidia-smi. If you're happy with the performance of your card but want it to generate less heat you can change that without buying a new card: just lower the power cap. That's what I do for when my machine's folding proteins.
Perkeleen_Vittupää Sep 17, 2020
Waiting for AMD's RDNA2 announcements. Will never be buying anything Nvidia again, that is for sure.
pete910 Sep 17, 2020
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Quoting: BreezeIf 6800XT is anything like the 5700XT launch:

  • October 28th announcement of release November 30th, reference only.
  • February 1st AIB cards released.
  • March 1st, I can build the kernel and Mesa from git branches to have a somewhat stable experience.
  • October 2021 first Ubuntu release that works reliably, April release didn't have everything.


I have bought a few Nvidia cards and they worked with proprietary drivers the week of release with zero issues. I have a 5700XT, the question for me is:

Is there a game that will be released before October 2021 that I will want 2x performance of 5700XT? If there is, I will buy a Nvidia RTX 3080, if not I'll buy a 6800XT most likely.

Games that may make me want to upgrade:
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Vampire the Masquerades: Bloodlines 2 (not looking good)
  • Starfield
  • New Elder scrolls game
  • Avowed

Just to note while I agree on the late oss driver support on distros like *buntu there was nothing stopping you from using AMD's prop driver.
Alm888 Sep 17, 2020
Hey, AMD! Did you see that? That's how it is done! A driver on a day-1!

I hope you can reproduce this "magic" of delivering on day-1 next time when I update my PC's GPU, as I really want to try your products out. Do not worry, AMD, you have plenty of time to practice yet.
pete910 Sep 17, 2020
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Quoting: Alm888Hey, AMD! Did you see that? That's how it is done! A driver on a day-1!

I hope you can reproduce this "magic" of delivering on day-1 next time when I update my PC's GPU, as I really want to try your products out. Do not worry, AMD, you have plenty of time to practice yet.

Like AMD do with their prop driver too you mean
Alm888 Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: Alm888Hey, AMD! Did you see that? That's how it is done! A driver on a day-1!

I hope you can reproduce this "magic" of delivering on day-1 next time when I update my PC's GPU, as I really want to try your products out. Do not worry, AMD, you have plenty of time to practice yet.

Like AMD do with their prop driver too you mean
Well, no. In fact I was thinking of AMD working closer with community or even writing stuff into the Open Source drivers preemptively in order to provide support at day-1.

But if this is not feasible (so much for the Power of Open Source!), then yes, a working proprietary stand-in driver at day-1 is needed. After all, what would I do with an expensive card (let's pretend I made a pre-order or something) if it just refuses to work (even in VESA or framebuffer mode). Look at it? Admire it? Place it on a shelf like a trophy?
x_wing Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: Alm888Well, no. In fact I was thinking of AMD working closer with community or even writing stuff into the Open Source drivers preemptively in order to provide support at day-1.

But if this is not feasible (so much for the Power of Open Source!), then yes, a working proprietary stand-in driver at day-1 is needed. After all, what would I do with an expensive card (let's pretend I made a pre-order or something) if it just refuses to work (even in VESA or framebuffer mode). Look at it? Admire it? Place it on a shelf like a trophy?

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-amdgpu-unified-navi-linux

Wish we had some Linux benchs for the new Nvidia GPUs but seems that Phoronix didn't receive one to bench. So it's kinda difficult to say how "good" is the day-1 support for this new RTX series.
Shmerl Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: Alm888Hey, AMD! Did you see that? That's how it is done! A driver on a day-1!

They publish their dkms driver (which is open source) pretty much on day one. They can't force upstream kernel release schedule or Mesa release schedule, or llvm and so on.

So you can be in situation when upstream projects are lagging behind, while needed support is already public. What can be improved though, is distros providing their own bundled support in such cases until upstream catches up. But most distros don't care about such use cases.


Last edited by Shmerl on 17 September 2020 at 6:21 pm UTC
peta77 Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: peta77So no reason for me to even think about replacing my 2080Ti. If there'd be a card with same performance & memory and much lower power demands ( -> less heat / noise produced ), I might think about a replacement.

It depends where your bottleneck is with your 2080 Ti. In many ways, the 3070 is going to perform better, if the bottleneck is compute speed rather than VRAM.

While the 2080 Ti has a nominal 250 W TDP, the power cap is configurable with nvidia-smi. If you're happy with the performance of your card but want it to generate less heat you can change that without buying a new card: just lower the power cap. That's what I do for when my machine's folding proteins.

Powercap is unfortunately not an option because of the few cases where there's actually some performance issue (some maps in War Thunder and X-Plane in general with very high quality settings). I try to ignore the fan noise and additional heating then. Otherwise enforcing VSync does reduce the load in most cases a lot, it doesn't make sense to render more frames than your display can handle anyway. And VRAM: for the work related stuff I'm doing with it even the 11GB are sometimes not enough and I have to use system memory too. So a GPU with less memory? No.
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