Most graphics card launches change up the market and the competitiveness of other graphics cards. This year’s “Ampere” graphics card launch from Nvidia Corp was different as it had a jump in performance unseen in over 20 years. Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. also announced their PS5 and Xbox Series X, advertising 4k gaming at up to 120 frames per second. This leap in performance coupled with the lowering of graphics card prices from Nvidia created big anticipation towards the launch of “Ampere” and hope for Nvidia to outperform the console companies.
Nvidia is one of two companies that design processing units called graphics cards that are used to render images on a computer. The other company is Advanced Micro Devices Inc. or AMD, which generally focuses more on the lower end of the graphics card industry, while Nvidia focuses on the high end. Every few years, they release a new generation of graphics cards with better performance than the last generation. This generation was dubbed “Ampere” with the graphics cards being called “RTX 3000” which was released in mid-Sept.
Nvidia likes to price their new graphics cards at the same price as the previous generation so that the company can get people to buy newer technology. Usual performance leaps are around 20-30 percent at the same price, but the value was where ray tracing came in. Ray tracing is a rendering technology that makes light reflect as it does in real life, but this comes in huge hits in performance. The 2000 series graphics cards were built with the new ray tracing technology, but the 3000 series raytracing is over 80 percent better in some instances and has a smaller performance hit. This change in performance caused many to dub the 2000 series as a complete ripoff as those who bought it were paying a premium to test out Nvidia’s new technology.
“I don’t think the 2060 is too useless, its lower price than the 3060 ti, but it’s not too obsolete yet, but everything else is obsolete… the 5700xt is going to be obsolete after October because the 3060 ti is releasing soon… the 5700xt and the 5700 are probably too overpriced because Nvidia is just releasing better GPUs for lower prices… I mean every single time AMD has failed to beat Nvidia at the high-end market, so they are probably going to stick with the low-end market” says Matthew Ramirez, a freshman from San Mateo High School.
An interesting note is that on the day of the “RTX 3080”’s launch, the stock for the graphics card ran out in just a few minutes after its release, as the flow from users attempting to access Nvidia’s website overwhelmed it. Many bots were used to buy mass amounts of the graphics card and resell them for ludicrous amounts of money, causing even more problems for those wanting to buy the graphics card.
During the launch event for “Ampere,” Nvidia advertised the new “RTX 3070” graphics card as being faster than the “RTX 2080 ti,” the second-best graphics card at the time for only $500. This enraged many who had recently bought 2080ti’s as they had paid a premium price, $1200 for a card that was usurped immediately. Also, most people sell their old graphics cards when upgrading, but with the resale value of a “2080 ti” being $500, many people who have bought new high-end graphics cards recently will be losing a lot of money.
When all is said and done, there are two big takeaways from the launch of “Ampere”. First being that the “RTX 3000” graphics cards have huge value and when they do eventually come back in stock again, buying them if you have the money is definitely worth it. Second, is that you should not buy a graphics card before the launch of a new generation, but more broadly speaking would be the importance of researching an item before buying it, as many found out the hard way.