Nvidia graphics cards are in high demand. Everyone wants the latest and greatest GPUs available, making it critical for gamers to build new rigs to know when a new model is introduced. Nobody wants to buy a new video card to have the next generation arrive a week later, with improved performance at the same price.
The GeForce 256 was Nvidia’s first GeForce graphics card, released in 1999, despite the fact that the company had already been producing GPUs for several years. Jensen Huang established Nvidia after leaving a post-building microprocessor at AMD to investigate the potential of GPUs to revolutionize computing and gaming. The GeForce cards improved and refined throughout time, culminating in the GeForce RTX 20-series, the first GPU to incorporate real-time ray tracing capabilities. This is still one of the most significant advances in GPU architecture, and it is a key component of the most recent GeForce cards.
Nvidia’s GPU architecture is typically updated every one to two years. For example, the GeForce GTX 10-series was released in 2016, whereas the RTX 20-series was not released until 2018. The GeForce RTX 30-series blew beyond anything that came before it in 2020, making it one of the most significant improvements ever. Previously, GPUs received annual updates, but the advancements were not as dramatic. COVID-19 began to shake up the global supply chain in 2020, and the impacts are still being felt.
Normally, a GPU architectural change would have been expected this year, but that is currently questionable. Nvidia revealed new cards based on the GeForce RTX 30-series at CES in January, including the RTX 3050 as a ‘low-cost’ model and two laptop GPUs, the RTX 3070 Ti, and 3080 Ti. This year, no new cards based on the RTX 30-series are planned. If a new architecture does exist in 2022, it will most likely arrive in September, like with the RTX 20 and 30-series.
GPUs are designed to conduct the same function across a large quantity of data at the same time, a technique known as parallel computing. A CPU, on the other hand, has a relatively small number of cores or threads for processing, optimized for general computing that necessitates large changes in what is done next dependent on the prior result. Intel and AMD are the industry leaders in PC chip design for sequential processing, and a single thread may complete its task at breakneck speed.
The GeForce RTX 3090 GPU from Nvidia can conduct operations on over 10,000 cores simultaneously. The best CPUs from Intel and AMD have thread counts in the double digits, implying that a GPU will outperform a CPU in parallel computation. This is what makes these chips perfect for gaming, graphics processing, AI, machine learning, and cryptocurrency mining. Unfortunately, the latter aim creates a huge demand for the most expensive and most recent Nvidia GPUs.