 Did you guys just see the same thing I did? RTX 3070 is gonna outperform a 2080 Ti at less than half the price, $499. Is Nvidia insane? I mean, even with all the leaks indicating that Ampere was gonna be super powerful, I was in no way ready for this. So, okay. Deep breath. There's a lot to get through here. So let's get started. After an F in the chat for any recent 2080 Ti buyers. Ouch! Like dang! Oh, and also our sponsor, Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can help keep your wallet bulge down and use our offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Now, obviously I'm not ready to hand Nvidia their crown until we see the new cards for ourselves. But based on what they've shown, we are in for one heck of a ride. They announced, well, a lot and we're gonna get to all of it. But the big one is Ampere is real and Ampere is an absolute monster. As it turns out, the recent leaks were accurate in many, if not most ways. Where touring-based RTX 2000 GPUs were manufactured on TSMC's 12 nanometer FinFET process, which was actually derived from their 16 nanometer process, Nvidia instead partnered with Samsung on a custom eight nanometer process for the RTX 3000 series. And the difference here is much bigger than we got moving from Pascal to Turing. Here's the thing, for over three years now, GeForce GPUs have had in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 million transistors per square millimeter. Ampere, around 60 million per square millimeter. That's over double. And breaking with what's become their habit lately, they didn't just use this increase in density to lower their own costs and keep selling a similar performance with some new features tacked on. The RTX 3080 boasts over 28 billion. That's with a B, transistors. What does that get us? Well, for starters, PCI Express Gen 4, upgraded tensor cores. Oh, and casually, more than double the CUDA cores across the board. And here's the kicker. That's not compared to the cards that each of the 3000 series GPU replaces. That's compared to the previous generation's step up. I'm not kidding. On paper, every Ampere card that was announced, even the 3070 is faster than a 2080 Ti. To find the last time that this happened, a third rung down GPU being faster than the previous flagship, I had to dig pretty deep through the archives. Here's a review from AnonTech showing the 6600 GT beating the FX5950. That was in 2004. And according to Nvidia, things are even better than they seem. They claim we are getting a 1.9 times performance per watt improvement, 2.7 times the shader performance, 1.7 times the ray tracing performance, and 2.7 times the tensor core performance, which in the real world translates to, sorry, you'll have to give me a second here. One metric butt ton. Nvidia showed another Marvel's fully ray traced graphics demo, but while Turing ran it at 720p, Ampere managed it at 1440p with more scene complexity. That's huge. And while to be fair, they had a little help from DLSS and from a new learning algorithm that derives missing color data from an incomplete image to improve performance, optimizations as a concept are nothing new and the results here speak for themselves. Nvidia has also got a new memory signaling technique, which carries four possible values per cycle compared to only two, effectively doubling the amount of memory bandwidth while also increasing the frequency significantly. So with the RTX 3080, you're gonna get 10 gigs and it's gonna run 320 watts of rated power with the RTX 3070 getting eight gigs of a more traditional GDDR6 at a mere 220 watts. Put that in context, a 2080 Ti was only 250 watts. Hoo-wee! And Nvidia claims that that RTX 3070, even though it consumes less power, is faster than the $1,200 2080 Ti with the new RTX 3080 doubling the performance of the 2080. And this is at 499 and 699 respectively. There's nothing else I can say. I'm absolutely mind blown. They even light up. But the question is why? Why, after all these years of driving GPU prices up, has Nvidia decided to bestow upon us these benevolent prices? We've got a couple of theories. One is that RTX 2080 and 2070 sales were something of a disappointment. I mean, it's not that they were terrible cards. They just weren't a very compelling upgrade for anyone who already owned a high-end 1000 series. So looking back then, in whatever the past version of a crystal ball is, it seems like Nvidia priced Turing high due to uncertain yields with TSMC and then hoped that RTX ray tracing would be enough to carry it to the new price point. So then now, because Samsung has worked with Nvidia to make this custom eight nanometer process, presumably it's more reliable, which means that despite the cost per wafer almost certainly being higher as they tend to be as we keep shrinking the process lower, they're getting more usable chips out of them working out to a much lower cost, which is great for consumers. I think it's fair to say that this is shaping up to be an absolute unicorn of a GPU release. Make sure you guys are subscribed by the way so you don't miss our review. And there's also another angle to the pricing. With launch date set for the end of Q3 and beginning of Q4, it's pretty clear who Nvidia sees as the real competition for 3000 series. And it's not AMD, or at least not directly anyway. It's Sony and Microsoft with the Xbox series X and PlayStation 5. And by getting out ahead of those launches, Nvidia seems to be trying to steal some of the thunder, hopefully preventing gamers from being lured away from PC where Nvidia dominates over to consoles where they will, I don't know, I guess there's Nintendo switch. One big hint here is that just like the PS5, the RTX 3000 GPUs have the ability to decompress data directly from an SSD attached to the system using direct storage. This means load times can be much shorter and the CPU doesn't need to get bogged down decompressing the gigantic assets that make up today's game worlds. Just like on the PlayStation 5 then, developers who leverage this technology can achieve more seamless loading and asset streaming than was previously possible. It also means that NVMe and even PCI express Gen 4 might actually become useful for gamers where load times are notoriously CPU bound in spite of the storage speed of modern systems. Nvidia is also hyper-focused on content creation here, looking to lure streamers and machinima enthusiasts with Nvidia broadcast and Nvidia Omniverse machinima. Nvidia broadcast includes a number of tools to apply effects to the microphone input, camera and speakers using tensor cores in what looks like a continuation of what RTX voice started. So in addition to the noise removal that was possible before, we can now without a green screen automatically remove backgrounds and apply a blur effect or backdrop and more with what looks like a very convincing effect compared to current solutions. Nvidia Omniverse machinima or NOM, I guess, wash it down with a drink with a water bottle from lttstore.com. Hey, no? Okay, whatever. NOM lets you import game libraries and tools, apply materials, physics simulations, poses captured from webcams, automatic facial animations from recorded audio and more to create a wholly unique scene for doing your own machinima. It's kind of like Ansel, except that you get full control over the scene instead of just the camera. They provided a pretty great looking example of a short clip of a siege to give us an idea of what can be accomplished. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if developers or even animators end up drafting scenes this way. It's pretty cool. So then RTX 3000, much less of a middle finger directly to Radeon Technologies Group and much more of a middle finger to the consoles, which isn't to say though that Nvidia hasn't done some extra credit work against RTG as well. Do you remember Radeon Antilag and how Nvidia originally claimed that it was just a tweak that users could already do to their drivers and then realized, oops, it's actually something more. And then they released Nvidia ultra low latency. Well, now they're putting the cherry on top with what they're calling Nvidia reflex, a driver path optimization technique that should be available to all GTX 1000 and newer users to reduce total system latency by up to roughly half. Now the exact mechanisms that they're exploiting to do this are currently unknown, but presumably there's a cost of some sort somewhere and you'll probably lose a bit of driver level control in the process. Finally, there's the one more thing. RTX 3090 is the formal name of this generation's Titan, but Jensen lovingly referred to it as the BFGPU. It sucks back a rated 350 Watts, hence the fancy new 12 pin power connector has over 10,000 CUDA cores and 24 gigs of GDDR6X memory and comes in at 1499. Meaning it's certainly priced like a Titan, but unlike the last couple of generations of Titans, it also appears to be specked like a Titan and it might even be worth that obscene price tag. They rolled out an LG 8K OLED TV to game on and demonstrated 8K 60 FPS gameplay using DLSS and RTX. Not only did the beefed up tensor cores appear to handle 8K upscaling without breaking a sweat, the RTX 3090 can apparently even record 8K HDR gameplay with shadow play. In fact, there's bits and pieces in the whole presentation that allude to upgrades across the board. AV1 codec support for decode is now available and NVENC is presumably no different on the rest of the Ampere cards, making 4K HDR shadow play a thing now. To go with it, it looks like we're finally getting HDMI 2.1 and probably more, but we can figure all of that out in our review. For now, all that's left to say is, boy, is it ever good to see the effects of more competition in the gaming hardware space, even if it came from a bit of an unexpected direction. Unlike my sponsor segues, you guys always expect those, this time for FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the small business cloud accounting solution that's built for owners. With FreshBooks, you can work anywhere thanks to their mobile apps, allowing you to create professional looking invoices in seconds on the go, snap pictures of your receipts so you don't lose them, and this is new on iOS, even automatically track your mileage so you can be organized and ready to maximize your deductions when tax time comes. With FreshBooks, you'll never miss an update. When a client has viewed your invoice or even when it becomes overdue, it'll let you know, and you can get 50% off your first three months of FreshBooks when you sign up for a pay plan at freshbooks.com forward slash tech tips. If you guys enjoyed this video and you'd like a bit of a refresher on what a bad GPU launch looks like, maybe go check out our review of the RTX 2080. Seems like Nvidia has learned a thing or two since then. Or maybe check out our 8K gaming video. That was terrible. That's gonna be way better now.