Nvidia Provides A Glimpse Of The RTX 3090 Ahead Of Its Reveal

Nvidia's special event is took place today, September 1, where it revealed its new line of graphics cards. Prior to today's proceedings, the GPU manufacturer offered a very brief glimpse at its RTX 3090 card in a video charting some of the innovations that the new architecture will introduce. Update: Live event is over; You can see the new 3000 series Nvidia cards in our roundup.

The video takes aim at the challenges Nvidia has faced with each new generation of GPUs, as it tackles increased cooling requirements, power consumption, and smaller design elements. It's a fascinating and technical look at some more obscure facets of GPU design, including an explanation of electrical crosstalk when power supply lines are too close to each other and start influencing the logic on a board's many transistors.

It's through these deep dives that Nvidia hints at some of the changes its new GPU line will introduce. For power requirements, the new cards will feature a redesigned 12-pin power connector to replace the double 8-pin ones found on modern GPUs. An adapter will be supplied in the box to make it compatible with all power supplies on the market, but it shows how Nvidia is thinking about the tight space and cooling constraints of the new Ampere design.

The card itself is only briefly shown near the end of the video, aligning with the numerous leaks of the design that have been circulating in recent weeks. The RTX 3090 is looking like a massive card, taking up three slots worth of space on a motherboard as opposed to the two-slot width of most RTX 2080 Ti cards. Rumors also suggest that the big card will come with a big price, with predictions pointing towards $1400 currently. Nvidia is supposedly also going to reveal the RTX 3080 too, which will presumably be cheaper.

The company is hosting its reveal event on September 1, where it will likely tout some of the benefits for the radical design changes and presumed cost of the cards. With hardware-based ray tracing supported on both Xbox Series X and PS5, the likelihood for its implementation in games might make Nvidia's second wave of ray-tracing-enabled cards a much more alluring proposition than the first.