Granted, it's a little confusing since the RTX 3090 is a GeForce RTX 3090, and the GeForce brand has historically entailed the green team's gaming chips, but Nvidia would still have the RTX 3080 as the existing 'gaming flagship'. The RTX 3090 is built for creators and professionals using high demand applications, rather than gaming. Therein surfaces an important distinction, at least from Nvidia's perspective. That's half of the 24GB loaded onto the RTX 3090 yet an improvement on the RTX 3080's 10GB. Then there's the memory capacity, and while it had looked for a while like Nvidia would stick 20GB of the good VRAM stuff on the RTX 3080 Ti, it's instead settled for a happy median of 12GB GDDR6X with the RTX 3080 Ti that's actually landed before us. Some judicious boosting baked into the card with Nvidia GPU Boost sees the card averaging a clock speed of 1,740MHz in Metro Exodus at 4K, only 26MHz slower than the RTX 3090 in the same run. The Founders Edition manages a boost clock of 1,665MHz, although will exceed that in practice. Generally speaking, it's CUDA Cores and clock speeds that we care for most, and the RTX 3080 Ti has both where it counts.

These are plenty useful in data centres for machine learning workloads, but for us gamers it's purely Nvidia's performance-pushing Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech that will find a use for these bespoke cores. These are the second generation of RT Core found within Ampere, and are pretty effective for ray tracing acceleration-they're the best around today anyways, and outperform AMD's roughly equivalent first-gen Ray Accelerators.ДЄlso included in the chip are 320 Tensor Cores, which are better suited to reduced precision operations used in machine learning. With 80 SMs comes 80 of Nvidia's RT Cores, tailor-made for ray tracing. That's only 256 cores shy of the RTX 3090's GA102-300 GPU, which tells you all you need to know about the computational firefight you can expect from these two. The GA102-225 GPU is equipped with 80 SMs that, thanks to a doubling of FP32 units with the Ampere architecture, contain 10,240 CUDA Cores.

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