GeForce 30 series
The GeForce 30 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 20 series. The series was announced on September 1, 2020. and started shipping on September 17, 2020. The cards are based on the Ampere architecture and feature hardware-accelerated raytracing (RTX) with Nvidia's second-generation RT cores and third generation Tensor Cores. 

The lineup, which is designed to compete with AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series of cards, consist of the entry-level and previously laptop-exclusive RTX 3050 and laptop-exclusive RTX 3050 Ti, mid-range RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, high-end RTX 3070, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 12GB, and the enthusiast RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. This is the last generation from NVIDIA to have official support for Windows 7 and 8.x as the latest drivers available for this generation require Windows 10.

Release and availability issues

Launch day for the RTX 3080 was September 17, 2020. The lack of pre-order functionality and high demand exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and boost in popularity of cryptomining, resulted in a large number of online retailers struggling with the sheer number of purchases. Newegg had completely sold out as expected on Black Friday. Long lines formed outside physical stores with stock, such as Micro Center in the United States, and  in Japan. Twitter users reported that they used bots to buy large numbers of cards to resell for higher prices.

Nvidia released a statement the following day, apologizing for the difficulties with their online store, which went down on launch day due to high traffic. On October 2, Nvidia announced that it would delay the release of RTX 3070 cards by two weeks to guarantee availability. On October 5, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced delays due to supply shortages, which were expected to go on until 2021. On October 9, the company announced that all Founder's Edition graphic cards in the United States would temporarily be sold via Best Buy, while the official web store would be upgraded to improve the shopping experience. In early December, Nvidia blamed continued component shortages on Samsung wafer shortages, resulting in chip shortages, among other factors.

Shortages of RTX 30 series cards continued into 2021, and has been ongoing ever since its release. In an effort to limit purchases by cryptominers, Nvidia announced in February that the RTX 3060 cards would be able to detect algorithms for mining of the Ethereum cryptocurrency and halve the hash rate. Shortly after release, NVIDIA accidentally released a driver update which disabled the detection. In March, TechRadar reported that the shortages could continue until the third quarter of the year, in part blaming a global GDDR6 memory shortage and the cards' supply being bought out by cryptominers. In April, Hong Kong Customs and Excise seized 300 non-video CMP cards.

Nvidia officially announced new RTX 3080, RTX 3070, RTX 3060 Ti Lite Hash Rate (LHR) SKUs on May 18, 2021, which limits the Ethash mining hash rate.

Nvidia released the RTX 3080 Ti on June 3, and the RTX 3070 Ti one week later, on June 10. Both included the cryptocurrency mining hash rate limiter.

There have been multiple attempts to meet the demand. EVGA has a system designed to put people into a queue; the goal is to prevent cards from selling out quickly and decrease wait time.

Besides the Founders Edition, there are also a variety of aftermarket cards, referred to as "custom cards" by Nvidia. The graphics chip is taken from Nvidia and parts of the card are modified according to the company's specifications. Such modifications include: clock speeds, fans, heat sinks, connectors, and aesthetics. Such aftermarket cards tend to perform better than Nvidia's in-house cards, but such increased performance comes with tradeoffs in temperature and power consumption. Manufacturers include: Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, ASUS, EVGA, INNO3D. 

Nvidia officially released the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card on January 11, 2022 and the desktop GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card on January 27, 2022. The RTX 3050 had previously only had a laptop variant that was launched on May 11, 2021 along with the laptop variant of the RTX 3050 Ti that currently still has no desktop variant.

Details
Architectural improvements of the Ampere architecture include the following:

 CUDA Compute Capability 8.6
 Samsung 8nm
 Doubled FP32 performance per SM on Ampere GPUs
 Third-generation Tensor Cores with FP16, bfloat16, TensorFloat-32 (TF32) and sparsity acceleration
 Second-generation Ray Tracing Cores, plus concurrent ray tracing and shading and compute
 GDDR6X memory support (RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3080 12GB, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 3090 Ti)
 PCI Express 4.0
 NVLink 3.0 (RTX 3090)
 HDMI 2.1 with full 48Gbps bandwidth
 PureVideo Feature Set K hardware video decoding with AV1 hardware decoding

GeForce 30 (30xx) series
Only the RTX 3090 supports 2-way NVLink.

All the RTX 30 GPUs are made using the 8nm Samsung node.

GeForce 30 (30xx) series for notebooks

See also
 GeForce 10 series
 GeForce 16 series
 GeForce 20 series
 Quadro
 List of Nvidia graphics processing units

References

 Notelist

External links
 Official website
 Nvidia Ampere GA102 GPU Architecture whitepaper
 

Computer-related introductions in 2020
3000 series
Graphics processing units
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the video game industry
Graphics cards