The historical age that gave rise to man’s greatest invention on a small scale, the era of information technology, has come to an end. Begun a few years after Tesla’s death and then resumed between the two world wars, this world has created a market and a succession of discoveries in unique technology: from telephone cable to radio waves, WiFi, simple wireless connections, all technologies that serve on a large scale but in our small, in every home, a calculator of the 70s’ has become a PC system able to reproduce three-dimensionally areas of such complexity to be comparable to some places in the real world.
Only two years ago, for the first time, a technology capable of reproducing the effects of light, reflections and the same material (e.g. fire and ripples in the water) to perfection arrived on the market. They are called “Raytracing” and a little helper…the DLSS, capable of analyzing the most distant graphics and upscaling them to create a visual effect more similar to what the human eye does when observing a panorama or a vast area. Nvidia introduced both these novelties in its 2000 series graphics cards, which includes 2060, 2070 and 2080 with their updated versions with the name “Super” and the cards that are part of the Enthusiast range, i.e. the 2080ti and the TITAN card, intended only for experts in the creation of graphic environments, think of the world of animation cinema that needs similar components.
From the moment they were released, people were already aware that the next milestone would close the doors to everything that preceded it in the past. Now in the world of Computer or Gaming, we can explore graphic worlds unimaginable at the beginning of the century. The most significant achievement to date is the famous Flight Simulator 2020 by Microsoft. Every single space on the surface of our planet has been recreated three-dimensionally to be explored by the other. As you can imagine the 2000 cards are not able to support such graphics, here comes finally the new series of Nvidia…the RTX 3000.
Not entering too much in a technical environment the new series of video cards brings an increase never seen in history during a generation step, that is an increase between 30 and 50%. The line is currently composed by 3070, 3080 and 3090, to make you understand the type of growth the 3070 will be more powerful than a 2080ti, with a cost that revolutionizes this area too. A 2080ti cost 1400 euro while the 3070 will have an official cost of 519 euro with an expected release in October this year, while currently, the 3080 is already available (both in founders edition, the Nvidia house version and in custom version, a version released by other IT companies) at the cost of 719 euro with a 30% higher power output than a 2080ti.
These cards are made up, like the previous ones, of RTcore and graphic cores but doubled in the new series allowing an even more realistic visual rendering during the design of virtual environments. This year, however, it’s not only the 3000 cards that are on the market but in the coming months, we expect the release of the new processors by Intel and AMD together (obviously) with the latest Microsoft and SONY home consoles (Xbox X Series/Series S and PS5) that also close the famous chapter of the Console War, due to a preference in terms of hardware or game environment.
Today the virtual reality market is slowly recovering because we finally have technologies able to provide us with a much more complex immersive experience. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to achieve total immersion in virtual environments. This technology could be essential in medical, military and learning environments, for example, allowing young people to study history by living it in a virtual world.
The PC gamer market has reached its golden year, and all the bands of new and old players have the opportunity to test these new applications in the computer field. For those interested in entering this world, there is no better time to do so. Maybe we will be ready for such an incredible evolution only in 10 years when even a render of our planet could become obsolete compared to what we will be able to create.
by Antonella Malizia