At least one of these video cards is cheaper!
Nvidia RTX 3090 is the new king of performance. Until we see the Super or Ti variants, this is the best NVIDIA has to offer. So while Nvidia seems to want to state that this is a flagship graphics card, it is not a sequel to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
And while we probably won’t see any discounts on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 anytime soon, there will likely be a lot of buzz around this top-end graphics card throughout the holiday season. So we thought it would be nice to see how it pits up against its predecessor, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
Nvidia RTX 3090 vs RTX 2080 Ti: Price
Unlike the rest of Nvidia’s cards, the RTX 3090 actually costs more than the RTX 2080 Ti. RTX 3090 costs from $1499, and RTX 2080 Ti – about $999. However, both prices are rather overpriced.
Due to the high demand for new Nvidia graphics cards, they are hard to find freely available, and a quick look at the market reveals that the RTX 2080 Ti still sells well above its retail price in many cases. So while the RTX 2080 Ti should be cheaper than the RTX 3090, it is unknown when or if you can find any of these at the appropriate price.
Nvidia RTX 3090 vs. RTX 2080 Ti: Specs
The RTX 3090 leaves little hope for the RTX 2080 Ti when it comes to specs. The new card has 10,496 CUDA cores, compared to the 4,352 CUDA cores of the old card. That’s more than doubled and still stands out even when you consider that the new design splits cores between cores designed for FP32 (floating point) and cores that can do FP32 or INT32 (Integer 32) operations. Even if all of the shared load cores were focused on INT32 operations, the remaining FP32-based CUDA cores would still be much larger than the 2080 Ti.
The RTX 3090 may have fewer Tensor Cores (328), but this is a newer version than the 544 Tensor Cores of the RTX 2080 Ti. The RT 3090’s 82 cores have the edge over the RT 2080 Ti’s 68 cores in terms of ray tracing. The new card even runs at higher clock speeds with a 1395 MHz base clock, a 1695 MHz boost over the 1350 MHz base clock, and a 1635 MHz boost for the RTX 2080 Ti.
The gap only widens when looking at memory. The RTX 2080 Ti has an impressive 11GB of GDDR6 memory on a 352-bit bus with 616GB / s memory bandwidth. But the RTX 3090 leaps into Titan territory with 24GB of GDDR6X on a 384-bit bus for a whopping 936GB / s memory bandwidth.
All that RTX 3090 power comes at a price. The card has a power consumption of 350W, while the RTX 2080 Ti has a modest power consumption of 260W.
Another feature that cannot be ignored is the HDMI port. If you plan on playing on a 4K / 120Hz or 8K TV, the RTX 3090’s HDMI 2.1 port is a must. The RTX 2080 Ti is equipped with HDMI 2.0, which can only give you 4K / 60Hz without dropping HDR and color depth. However, you can ignore this if you are using the best gaming monitors, as DisplayPort on any card can provide significantly more bandwidth for high resolution and frame rates.
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