Yesterday morning as a part of CES 2021, Jeff Fisher, Senior Vice President of Nvidia GeForce took the stage to announce the RTX 3060, as well as a line of 30 series powered gaming laptops.
The event began with a recap of 2020. With COVID-19 restrictions across the world keeping people at home, gaming apps and services have exploded in popularity. Steam, Discord and Youtube gaming have seen their audiences more than doubled when compared to user statistics from 2018, while the global Esports audience has grown by one hundred million. Fisher then recounted the Nvidia event from last fall, where the company first announced the 30 series GPUs, second generation RTX and DLSS 2.0. The previously announced graphics cards include the GeForce RTX 3090, 3080, 3070. All of which have been incredibly difficult for consumers to purchase over the last few months.
Regarding the shortages of 30 series cards, Fisher said “Ampere has been our fastest selling architecture ever, selling almost twice as much as our prior generation. We know these products have been hard to find. I want to thank you for your patience as we continue to work hard to catch up”. If the comments on the video are of any indication though, this statement doesn’t seem to have eased any of the contempt fans have for the 30 Series launch.
Fisher then moved on to highlight Nvidia’s cloud based game streaming service, GeForce Now. This service allows users to access libraries of PC games on a variety of devices, including mobile, chromebooks, and even Apple laptops with RTX and DLSS enabled. The service currently features 800 titles, including 80 free-to-play games such as Fortnite and Apex Legends.
The focus then shifted to RTX. 36 Games are currently “powered by RTX”, including the number 1 battle royale game, Fortnite, and the best selling game of all time, Minecraft. The introduction of ray tracing on the previous 20 series graphics cards was somewhat of a letdown to gamers, as enabling ray tracing in games drastically reduced performance. With Ampere, Nvidia aimed to make ray tracing more efficient. The new generation of RTX is supported by DLSS 2.0, a deep learning AI that reduces the hardware cost of ray tracing, boosting frame rates with RTX on. Nvidia highlighted two upcoming titles that will feature RTX support, Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach, and F.I.S.T.
The top Esports titles are supporting Nvidia Reflex, the high refresh rate, ultra low latency displays announced earlier this year. These titles include Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone, and Apex Legends. Adding to the lineup, Nvidia announced that there will be five more Reflex displays coming from Acer, AOC, and Asus.
Fisher then moved on to the topic of upgrades. He described modern AAA games as “unplayable” on the GTX 1060, a two generations old GPU. Attempting to use ray tracing on these cards drastically reduces frame rates. For anyone running a Pascal GPU, Fisher insists now is the best time to upgrade with the new RTX 3060. This card features the same Ampere architecture as the rest of the 30 series, with a much lower price point.
The RTX 3060 features 13 shader-TFLOPS, 25 RT TFLOPS, 101 Tensor-TFLOPS, 12GB G6 and starts at $329. No release date was provided. It’s likely that these cards, especially with their low starting price will suffer the same stock issues as the rest of the 30 series line.
There was speculation of an RTX 3080 Ti announcement, but the standalone graphics card segment was wrapped up with the 3060.
Fisher then moved on to gaming laptops, introducing a line of lightweight and extremely powerful laptops powered by 30 series GPUs. Options include the newly announced 3060, and the previously announced 3070, 3080 graphics cards. He also made note of RTX accelerated AI features, which will benefit anyone working with creative software. These benefits can be seen in Adobe Photoshop, Davinchi Resolve, Blender, Adobe Premiere and even in Nvidia’s own software Omniverse and Broadcast.
Nvidia is billing the launch of the new 30 series laptops as the “biggest launch ever”, with more than 70 gaming and studio laptops from every OEM. These laptops will be available starting January 29th.
In all, Nvidia seems to be shifting focus to their gaming laptop line for the moment, as PC building has become more and more difficult due to current demand and conditions. If their gaming laptop launch is as big as they’re saying, it might become an easier path for many people to get their hands on this current generation of graphics cards. However, the pricing for these laptops remains to be seen. The budget friendly RTX 3060 is sure to be a popular option amongst PC builders, however stock will likely be an issue as it’s been with the rest of the current generation of GPUs. But, we have great news! We have the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 in stock and installed into our VRLA Tech Apollo Gaming PC. Upgrade to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 TI for an even more powerful PC!