NVIDIA Announces the RTX 30 Series

NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series in September 2020, introducing the Ampere architecture to consumer graphics cards. The RTX 3080 and 3090 offered major increases in shader throughput and second-generation ray-tracing hardware compared with Turing.

Ampere reorganized its streaming multiprocessors so more floating-point work could execute in parallel. Second-generation RT Cores accelerated ray intersection calculations, while third-generation Tensor Cores supported AI operations used by features such as DLSS. The cards also adopted fast GDDR6X memory on higher-end models.

Demand immediately exceeded supply, later worsened by semiconductor shortages and cryptocurrency mining. The launch became memorable both for its technical performance jump and for how difficult the cards were to buy during 2020 and 2021.