It’s been more than two years, but Nvidia's long-awaited reveal of the RTX 3080 and 3090 is upon us. Believed to be called the GeForce RTX 3000-series, the graphics cards will be built around Nvidia's new Ampere GPU architecture and promise to build upon the ray-tracing capabilities and power of the current GeForce RTX 2000-series.
Nvidia's Special GeForce event will take place on September 1 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. BST
On September 1 , Nvidia will host a “GeForce Special Event” dedicated to “what comes next” after 21 years of being involved in PC gaming. It hasn’t officially said it will reveal a new lineup of GeForce graphics cards, but that seems like a given.
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So here’s what you need to know about following the event live. And what we might expect from Nvidia at the start of the fall.
How to watch Nvidia’s GeForce Special Event live
It’s very easy to follow the GeForce Special Event by heading over to Nvidia’s GeForce event page on September 1 at 9 a.m. PT, 12 p.m. ET, or 5 p.m. BST.
And it’s very likely that Nvidia will also stream the event live on YouTube on the Nvidia GeForce channel. You'll also be able to catch the reveal on Nvidia's Twitch channel, which is currently playing a countdown to showtime. You can check out an embed of the stream right here:
If you want to drop in and out of the Nvidia news, then check back with Tom's Guide as we'll bring you all the important announcements from the event as they happen.
Nvidia’s GeForce Special Event: What to expect
Nvidia's official U.K. Twitter page has been tweeting graphical landmarks over its lifetime of providing graphics cards and tech to the PC gaming world. With that in mind, we can expect the leather jacket-sporting Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of Nvidia, to wax lyrical about Nvidia’s long gaming GPU history before going into what’s next for GeForce graphics.
From there, we expect to see several top-end GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics cards revealed. Spearheading the lineup will be the GeForce RTX 3090 — it might also be called the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti — followed by the GeForce RTX 3080 and the GeForce RTX 3070. There could even be an RTX 3070 Ti thrown into the mix.
These will be the flagship cards of the new GeForce range, offering a hike in performance over the current Turing architecture-based graphics cards, as well as boosted ray-tracing performance.
And we’re likely to see some new graphical processing tech to boost performance without compromising on quality; Nvidia introduced deep learning supersampling (DLSS) at its last GeForce event in 2018, so perhaps we could see a second-generation version.
As for more mainstream and affordable next-gen GeForce cards, we are more likely to see them either a month or so after the launch of the high-end cards or early 2021. And laptop variants are also likely to arrive next year.
Overall, we’re not expecting the new GeForce RTX cards to revolutionize PC gaming graphics. But they will come at a time when the PS5 and Xbox Series X are preparing to launch. Both those consoles promise to deliver ray-tracing rendering, so we can expect more games to make use of the technique.
So that should create more of an appetite for graphics cards with ray-tracing tech. In turn, that means the Ampere-generation GeForce RTX cards — which are Nvidia's second-generation of RTX graphics cards — present a good opportunity for PC gamers to now opt for a ray-tracing GPU. Expect to see future entries in our best gaming PCs list to come with GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics cards.
