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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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Shmerl Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: MohandevirIn fact, the gaming GPU market is driven by two selling points, atm: 4K 144hz monitors and RTX.

It doesn't look like it. Only small percentage uses 4K at such framerates and RTX (I assume you simply mean ray tracing) is also not a major feature that's used in practice. The bulk of the market is taken by mid range cards or cards aimed at 2560x1440 / 144 Hz segment.

Something like VR on the other hand could be a driver for most high end segment, but VR is also quite a small use case so far.

I.e. most high end cards are surely quite hyped and talked about, but they are not where most money is at least.


Last edited by Shmerl on 17 September 2020 at 9:05 pm UTC
Mal Sep 17, 2020
  • Supporter
Poor xbox. And poor ps5. Brutalized even before leaving the womb.
Breeze Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: pete910Well thats not good I admit but you did have day one support so the reply to Breeze is true in which he/she is talking complete bullshit !

Where is NVIDIAs day one support with there OSS driver? Oh, wait....

There were other problems too. Computer frozen from using GIMP and Firefox, poor performance in some games, random freezes from desktop with no programs open, 2 monitors not working. I can't remember a time where I had Linux completely freeze and not be able to switch to terminal before getting a 5700XT. No one that used the AMD proprietary driver on day one 5700XT would consider it even close to the stability of a typical NVIDIA beta driver release. AMD had "day one support" in that there was a driver to download and install for the first few weeks in 18.04 and you may be able to play a 3D game for a little bit, but not use GIMP. It would be like you ordering a steak and me serving you a rat steak and saying "still technically a steak."
bisbyx Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: subDespite not even remotely considering Nvidia products for myself,
someone not waiting for AMD's release (soon) before buying a 30XX must be outright crazy. :D

I want to agree with you. But for people who dont care about nvidia vs AMD. For $700 in 1.5 months, AMD is not going to go roll out something noticeably faster than the 3080. They might roll something out at $700 but the same speed, or they might roll something out 20% faster than 3080... but costs more.

And at that point, you've just waited 1.5 months to get something that is roughly equal.

The reason to wait is because rushing into anything is a bad idea, or because you care about open source drivers (most buyers are going to be Windows, so not like AMD is really winning any favor there). I personally am waiting because of open source drivers, so for the moment I'm an AMD "loyalist". This generation is theirs to lose. I'm basically planning on building a new PC with a threadripper 4960x and a radeon 6700xt at the end of the year. If the top tier card of theirs is slower than a 3070, or costs $1000 for less than 3080 performance... I'll go nvidia. But I 100% don't expect to get a better price to performance deal, only better open source drivers.
Mohandevir Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: MohandevirIn fact, the gaming GPU market is driven by two selling points, atm: 4K 144hz monitors and RTX.

It doesn't look like it. Only small percentage uses 4K at such framerates and RTX (I assume you simply mean ray tracing) is also not a major feature that's used in practice. The bulk of the market is taken by mid range cards or cards aimed at 2560x1440 / 144 Hz segment.

Something like VR on the other hand could be a driver for most high end segment, but VR is also quite a small use case so far.

I.e. most high end cards are surely quite hyped and talked about, but they are not where most money is at least.

You are right. Didn't say the bulk of the market was there. I was referring to the hardware manufacturers that are pushing for 4k 144hz (monitors and hdtvs) and RTX (gpus) to sell their latest innovations (Marketing). Didn't say it was successful... Yet.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 17 September 2020 at 10:07 pm UTC
peta77 Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: Breeze...
There were other problems too. Computer frozen from using GIMP and Firefox, poor performance in some games, random freezes from desktop with no programs open, 2 monitors not working. I can't remember a time where I had Linux completely freeze and not be able to switch to terminal before getting a 5700XT.
....
It's not like there were never such problems with NVidia. The question is, what's the source/reason. I had somewhat similar problems a while ago where the whole X-session and input was frozen (sometimes within hours, sometimes after a few day) and the only thing showing up having a problem / reporting errors was the NVidia driver. They couldn't reproduce it, I couldn't deliver a simple procedure how to create that procedure. The solution in the end was: switch from KDE4 to XFCE and the problem was gone (no driver or other software update). So who's to blame here? NVidia? KDE? Both? The framework(s) that manages their interaction? Hard to say (as most times with modern software). So you shouldn't be too quick to put blame on AMD or whoever. They might have implemented everything according to spec (it's very often NVidia that does some weird implementations), but when lots of packages / programs are starting to interact, things might still go wrong because people interpret specifications differently or they rely on some special behaviour they know from other implementations which actually might not be mentioned in the specs or marked as undefined.
CatKiller Sep 17, 2020
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  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: bisbyxI want to agree with you. But for people who dont care about nvidia vs AMD. For $700 in 1.5 months, AMD is not going to go roll out something noticeably faster than the 3080. They might roll something out at $700 but the same speed, or they might roll something out 20% faster than 3080... but costs more.

And at that point, you've just waited 1.5 months to get something that is roughly equal.

The reason it's sensible to wait isn't because you're necessarily expecting AMD to release something that will blow Ampere away.

I don't regret my purchase of a 2080 Ti in the slightest: I've had two years of excellent gaming performance, and I'll likely have several more. But if, at the time, AMD had anything to offer that was in the same ballpark, or even competitive with the 1080 Ti, it would likely have been a darn sight cheaper.

In a couple of months' time, if AMD can show that they're in the game, perhaps Nvidia will slash prices, or perhaps they'll release Ti versions. It's worth waiting even if you're planning to get an Nvidia card.
Avehicle7887 Sep 17, 2020
Definitely going for an AMD card next.

My main system runs a 2060 Super however in recent months I also bought an RX 5500XT (cheapest Navi card I could get my hands on) to learn more about Mesa, compiling the drivers and living without Nvidia in general.

After my experience, I can say I like AMD better. Mesa has a certain degree of flexibility that Nvidia doesn't offer (such as running multiple drivers if necessary). If I were to go back in time with what I know now, it would be a 5700XT.

TBH I'm not expecting AMD to blow Nvidia out of the water in October, but if performance will be anywhere close at a reasonable price, I'm game for switching out my 2060 S.

Lately I've been playing on my 5500XT system a lot, I haven't encountered any crashes, glitches or otherwise instabilities.

Sorry long read :)
Shmerl Sep 17, 2020
Quoting: bisbyxBut I 100% don't expect to get a better price to performance deal, only better open source drivers.

I expect that AMD will provide better price / performance combination, but it wouldn't bother me if it won't happen. I'm not going to use Nvidia either way.
gradyvuckovic Sep 18, 2020
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

I bought a 5700 XT too and what you described was my experience as well. It was very disappointing. If AMD was as prompt as NVIDIA on drivers, I don't think ANYONE would buy an NVIDIA GPU on Linux at all.
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