On September 1, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the launch of the GeForce RTX 30 Series graphic cards. And these babies are amazing! The official GeForce 30 Series launch event from Jensen’s jaw-droppingly beautiful kitchen (I need all the spatulas) was probably one of the best product launches of 2020.

Nvidia Reveals RTX 3000 series Set To release September and October

The RTX 30 series, like previous series, will have three GPUs: RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and the RTX 3090. The RTX 3080 will be Nvidia’s flagship GPU, just as the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080ti were for the 2000 series. This powerful 28 billion transistor GPU model was modified to fit in the graphics card by using Samsung’s 8 nanometer technology.

So how much will the RTX 3000 series cost?

The GeForce RTX 3070 will cost $499. The RTX 3080 will cost $699. And the RTX 3090 will cost $1499. Not only is Nvidia competing with its own legacy 2000 series, but it’s RTX 3070 and 3080 seek to compete with next gen consoles releasing this holiday season. Knowing that gamers have been waiting for Nvidia’s next graphics card upgrade, Jensen says during the launch event, “To all my Pascal friends, it’s now safe to upgrade.”

RTX 3000 Series Features

Powered by Ampere, Nvidia is essentially outdoing, well, Nvidia, giving us a beast of a GPU that includes the world’s first “24 GB GDDR6X VRAM, first HDMI 2.1, and discrete GPUs with support for the AV1 codec.” Nvidia promises near-instant game loading, with it’s upgraded input/output architecture, the RTX IO, promising to load assets 100-times faster.

Additional highlights that gamers and content creators will love include:

• NVIDIA Reflex, which reduces system latency and provides split-second PC gaming responsiveness

• NVIDIA Broadcast, which can turn any room into a home broadcast studio with AI-enhanced video and voice. Hello green screen without having an actual green screen!

• Updated NVIDIA DLSS to allow for 8K HDR gaming

• Turing tensor cores can run up to 110 teraflops of AI horsepower

But What Are Teraflops?

With all of the excitement about the Nvidia GeForce 3000 series, some of us non-techy gaming enthusiasts still had one burning question: wtf is a teraflop? No, seriously, don’t laugh! What is a teraflop? A teraflop or trillion floating point operations per second, is basically a scientific measurement of computer performance. One Tflop = 1trillion floating point operations per second. Essentially, teraflops are a way to measure computing power.

With both next gen consoles releasing later this year and the RTX 30 series releasing this month, it will be interesting to see which road gamers will take: a PS5, an Xbox, or upgrade their gaming rigs with a new RTX graphics card.

Watch the GeForce RTX 30 series official launch event here.