If you are a PC enthusiast or just someone who wants the best possible graphics for their games, you must be familiar with Nvidia. For years, Nvidia has dominated both the consumer mind-space and actual market-share when it comes to graphics cards. While AMD has certainly done a fantastic job with its Radeon line-up, it still has not managed to push Nvidia off the throne.
Nvidia launched its 20-series (otherwise known as Turing) graphics card family last year. While they did certainly bring a big boost in performance, their headlining features were real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS). While ray-tracing is undeniably cool and exciting, the RTX 20-series launched at steep prices (almost twice that of their predecessors). The most expensive model was the RTX 2080 Ti which cost a cool thousand dollars at launch.
So, when rumours began swirling around about the launch of the RTX 30-series (or Ampere), people did expect prices to be similarly high. But the world is in a quite different place right now than it was last year. Not so many people might be willing or have the ability to drop a large amount of cash on a graphics card.
Today we get to learn more about the pricing of the RTX 3090 thanks to a user on ChipHell going by the alias Alienxzy. He posted a screenshot taken from an alleged insider account with information about the RTX 3090 cards being made by Colorful. According to the information posted, AIB will be releasing two variants of the RTX 3090: Vulcan and Neptune. The Vulcan model will be air-cooled whereas the Neptune model will have a hybrid cooling solution.
The online price for the Vulcan model will be 13,999 CNY (Chinese Yuan) which converts to nearly 2000 USD. While the Neptune model will sell online for 12,999 CNY which converts to roughly 1730 USD. The post also reveals that both the graphics cards will have a 5 V RGB capability that will allow them to pair their lighting with that of the motherboard. The Vulcan model will also have an improved in-card display.
It is going to be interesting to see if fans are willing to pay such a steep price for the best possible performance.
