Nvidia’s next-generation premium GeForce RTX graphics card could cost as much as $1,499 when it launches on September 1, placing it at a premium of $300 higher than the current GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition card. Though a lot of the details about Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics have leaked in recent months, this is the first time we’re hearing about how much the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 card could cost when it debuts. Most recently, Nvidia had placed an #UltimateCountdown clock on its social media pages, leading many industry insiders to speculate that September 1 will be when the RTX 3000 series will launch.
Information about the price comes by way of user Wjm47196 on the Chiphell forums, Wccftech reported. According to the user, the GeForce RTX 3090 could come with a starting price of $1,399, and the Founders Edition could be priced at an extra $100, bringing the cost to $1,499.
Nvidia may feel justified in the price premium with this upcoming generation given the performance uplift and improved specifications that the RTX 3000 series is expected to deliver. For starters, the RTX 3090 is expected to have 24GB of DDR6X memory, more than double the amount of RAM that’s on the RTX 2080 Ti.
Coupled with a new Ampere architecture, the added RAM should allow the RTX 3090 to deliver significant improvements to real-time raytracing in video games, and leaked benchmarks suggest that Nvidia’s next-generation graphics card could deliver up to a 50% uplift in performance when compared to the RTX 2080 Ti.
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Though these leaked prices show that the new Founders Edition commands a 25% higher price tag over the RTX 2080 Founders Edition when that card was released, prices for custom designs can go even higher. And while these prices may seem high, especially given the economic uncertainty created by the global pandemic, pricing for the RTX 3090 may not seem so extravagant when compared to Nvidia’s higher-end RTX Titan card. The current Turing-based RTX Titan, for example, ships with the same 24GB of RAM that’s expected on the RTX 3090 but comes with a much higher price tag of $2,499. That’s a $1,000 step up from the expected price for the RTX 3090 Founders Edition.
With less than two full weeks until the official launch, we won’t have too much longer to wait until we find out what Nvidia’s plans are for these cards. Be sure to stay tuned to Digital Trends for all the latest RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 news.