NVIDIA Announces Bevy Of Mobile And Desktop GPUs At CES 2022, Including The Beastly RTX 3090 Ti
At its CES 2022 event, NVIDIA made a bunch of announcements, including several new pieces of hardware such as new high-end laptop GPUs. Those are exciting, but the green team also slapped bookends on its desktop GPU range, talked about its progress with GeForce NOW and NVIDIA Reflex, and announced free access to the full release version of NVIDIA Omniverse.
Starting right from the top, we have arguably the biggest announcement: the release of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti for laptops. As NVIDIA itself notes, this is the first time that the "x80 Ti" tier of GPU has come to laptops, at least in an official capacity.
Unfortunately, the company didn't share a full specs reveal on the new GPUs, but it did say that the mobile RTX 3080 Ti will come with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, and that laptops sporting the new top-end mobile Ampere part will start at $2,499. As for the mobile GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, NVIDIA noted it can "deliver 100 frames per second in 1440p resolution" (though it's not clear in which game) and that laptops so-equipped will start at $1,499.
Along with the new high-end laptop GPUs, NVIDIA announced that it has a new revision of its Max-Q technology available. NVIDIA didn't go into a ton of fine grain detail about the iteration of Max-Q, but said laptops that leverage it will have "up to 70% more battery life" than laptops without the technology.
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NVIDIA's New Desktop GPUs Come In Micro And Macro Form
On the desktop side of things, NVIDIA had a small announcement with a big audience, and a big teaser. That big teaser is that the GeForce RTX 3090 has been bumped down a notch in its product stack to make way for the new halo GPU: the RTX 3090 Ti. NVIDIA was a bit coy with the details, but commented that this card will run its 24GB of GDDR6X memory at 21 GT/s.
NVIDIA SVP Jeff Fisher holds the RTX 3090 Ti. (click to enlarge)
For performance, NVIDIA simply said that the RTX 3090 Ti will "crank out 40 TFLOPs for shaders, 78 TFLOPs for ray tracing, and a whopping 320 TFLOPs of AI muscle." As we all know, compute throughput numbers aren't necessarily indicative of gaming performance on their own, but for comparison's sake, the extant RTX 3090 puts out 35.6 TFLOPs in FP32, 69 TFLOPs for RT, and 285 TFLOPs for tensor compute, making the new card a modest upgrade in the flagship space. We'll know more details later.
The potentially more exciting announcement for most folks lands at the other end of NVIDIA's desktop GPU product catalog: the GeForce RTX 3050. This will be Nvidia's first ray tracing-capable GPU in the x50 range, and the smallest Ampere card to date—on the desktop, anyway. There's the recent Ampere-based GeForce RTX 2050 in laptops, but they don't actually come out until Spring.
Mean Green Is Also A Software Vendor
That's it for hardware announcements from NVIDIA this CES, but the company had a lot more to talk about than just hardware. The company's GeForce NOW game streaming platform is proliferating to AT&T devices and Samsung's smart TVs' "Samsung Gaming Hub" application. AT&T users with a 5G device a "qualifying plan" can pick up a six-month GeForce NOW priority membership for free. For its own part, GeForce NOW just picked up some new games, including Battlefield 4 and Battlefield V.
NVIDIA boasted that ten new games are getting RTX support, and showed clips from two: The Day Before, and Dying Light 2. Those games are also getting DLSS, as are Escape From Tarkov and Rainbow Six Extraction. NVIDIA Reflex is gaining steam too; the low-latency technology is showing up in God of War, Rainbow Six Extraction, and perhaps most usefully, iRacing.
Lastly, the company went over its successes in autonomous vehicles. NVIDIA is heavily invested in computer vision and AI technologies, and it says that electric vehicle manufacturers, robotaxi services, and autonomous logistics services are all quite interested in its DRIVE Hyperion platform. The end of its CES 2022 show was filled out by a demonstration of NVIDIA DRIVE Concierge, an always-on digital assistant for drivers.
