Introduction

Zotac today releases its GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity graphics card, a premium custom-design offering based on the GeForce RTX 3080 “Ampere” by NVIDIA. Zotac’s custom design focuses on meeting all the expectations of the DIY premium gaming segment, including a low-noise design, decent overclocking headroom, and a fair bit of ARGB bling to brighten up high-end gaming PC builds. This card sees the introduction of Zotac’s new and smarter IceStorm 2 cooling solution with idle fan-stop, and aesthetic enhancements from the Spectra 2 ARGB illumination package. A conventional triple-fan setup tames the next-generation beast underneath.

The GeForce RTX 3080 by NVIDIA is the company’s new flagship graphics card, designed to make 4K UHD gaming with RTX-on possible at a price you got a 1440p-segment graphics card for in the previous generation. The new Ampere graphics architecture introduces NVIDIA’s 2nd generation RTX real-time raytracing technology. NVIDIA innovated a means of combining raster 3D graphics with real-time raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadow, reflections, ambient occlusion, and global illumination, to make the hybrid raster+raytraced 3D scenes that are as true to life as possible and a generational leap above DirectX 12.

The GeForce Ampere architecture introduces a new generation double-throughput CUDA core design that can perform concurrent INT32+FP32 math. The new 2nd generation RT core doubles the BVH traversal and triangle intersection performance over the previous generation and introduces new fixed-function hardware that enables RTX effects such as raytraced motion blur. The 3rd generation Tensor core shares many similarities with its HPC cousin powering the A100 Tensor Core processor NVIDIA launched this Spring, which leverages the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural networks to double AI inference performance by an order of magnitude. NVIDIA heavily uses AI in its raytracing pipeline, and image-quality features, such as DLSS. The new DLSS 8K feature takes a stab at 8K gaming by utilizing AI.

The new GeForce RTX 3080 features more than double the CUDA core counts than the previous-generation, with over 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, 272 tensor cores, 272 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. All this compute muscle is fed data by an updated memory setup consisting of 10 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 320-bit wide memory interface, which works out to 760 GB/s of bandwidth—that’s 70% higher than the previous generation. There are several other “next generation” bits, such as support for PCI-Express 4.0 x16 bus, the latest HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4a connectivity, and AV1 video acceleration. NVIDIA built the GA102 over the 8 nm FFN process Samsung designed specially for NVIDIA.

As mentioned earlier, the Zotac RTX 3080 Trinity is one of the company’s premium custom-design RTX 3080 offerings, though like most other board partners, it is designing more bleeding edge products. The IceStorm 2 cooling solutions uses a trio of fans with alternative spin directions (although the same airflow direction) to minimize lateral vortex formation, which leads to noise. Since this is the Trinity SKU (and not Trinity OC), the card ticks at NVIDIA-reference clock speeds of 1710 MHz GPU Boost and 19 Gbps memory. Zotac sells their card at the NVIDIA MSRP of $700—no price increase.