The new power connector, PCIe 4.0, Video Decoder and more

The Founders edition cooler (dual axial-flow through thermals)

It was a topic of hot (pardon the pun) discussion for weeks, the Founder series will make use of a rather unique cooler design. The cards come with a compact PCB to facilitate two uniquely placed fans. This is a need due to the GA102 GPU board power draw design, it is extending over 300 watts (TGP not TDP). To anticipate that heat stress, NVIDIA unveiled an unusual cooler, in which the two fans are placed on the opposite side of each other. The outer fan is placed at the back but also was placed flipped so that both fans blow in the same direction. Sitting under each fan is a conventional heatsink with aluminum cooling fins and these are connected to the GPU via five heat pipes. The fan on the top side sucks in air passing 'through the graphics card', the air flows in at the front side (connector side), through the cooling block and then onwards. In a standard housing, the warm air will be blown out of the cabinet either by the outtake fans placed at the top or by the CPU cooler. The inner fan, in turn, blows through the short PCB practically straight over the GPU and VRM area, and can partially remove warm air straight from the housing at the rear and topside.

Blue = cold air, orange = warm exhausted

That 12-pin power connector

The Founders edition GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 cards will use the new NVIDIA 12-pin power connector, AIB cards will get the more traditional 8-pin connectors. It will also be the only card (for now) with that new 12-pin header. A converter cable for dual-8-pin to 12-pin will be included with the Founders edition cards. The connector can pass at least 300 Watts all by itself.

PCI Express Gen 4.0

New on the spec list is support for PCI-express 4.0. Competitor AMD had been making big bets with the 2019 NAVI products and already moved to PCIe Gen 4.0 as well as their chipsets and processors. But what does PCIe Gen 4.0 bring to the table? Well, simply put, more bandwidth for data to pass through. 

On the 4.0 interface, you’ll be hard-pressed to run out of bandwidth as each lane gets doubled up in that bandwidth, per lane. Of course, there has been a recent PCI-Express Gen 5.0 announcement as well, for ease of mind I already inserted it into the table. What benefits will you have at PCIe gen 4.0 with a graphics card? If we are to believe Nvidia's performance claims, the high-end RTX 3000 cards will probably benefit more from the new standard to make the most of the graphics memory buffers. 

RTX IO, GPU to Directly Access SSD, offloads the CPU

NVIDIA introduced new technology next to the three graphics cards. One that is particularly interesting is RTX IO, a set of tools that uses a GPU for file compression, this is an attempt to improve the storage performance size of games. NVIDIA mentioned that the RTX IO technology package works with the Windows DirectStorage API to improve game compression on SSDs. Consequently, your PC can open files faster, ensuring a faster loading experience. This implementation application is similar to what happens on the new generation of consoles, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. Nvidia aspires to resolve IO challenges with RTX IO, directing data from an SSD to the Vram and performing lossless decompression in the GPU itself. Nvidia notes that games have evolved a lot in recent times in this regard thanks to the use of NVMe SSDs, but the high processor usage load still creates headaches. Processing data directly on the video card pledges up to 100 times more performance than solutions currently in use. The procedure will also relieve the CPU and guarantee approximately 20% less work for the processor. The graph displayed by the manufacturer shows reads up to 14 GB/s with low CPU usage. Windows DirectStorage should also reduce file size. Therefore, the trend is that developers can deliver games with faster downloads and this results in less space consumed on the SSD. NVIDIA confirmed that the tool will work with all Ampere and Turing GPUs, so that would be the RTX 20 and RTX 30 models. On the other hand, according to Nvidia, Microsoft plans to start releasing DirectStorage for Windows next year. On the game side, the developer must actively integrate the API into their game. We've seen examples and they've been nothing short of breathtaking. The GPU load remains close to NIL and the uncompressed data just decompresses in split seconds. It's going to be a massive improvement (for games that choose to make use of it). Very exciting, but we estimate it'll take some time before we actually see this implemented.

8K  - AV1 - HDMI 2.1

NVIDIA is profiling the GeForce RTX 3090 as the first 8K capable GPU. And with features like DLSS applied we can certainly see that coming to the PC, not in high framerates, but it would be a possibility. New is active hardware-accelerated support for the new AV1 video compression standard. Ampere based graphics cards can play back over their video decoder engine without utilizing your processor. NVIDIA specifically mentions decoder and not encoder. The NVENC API will not support encoding at this time. It has been talked about for a long time, but HDMI 2.1 is noted as a specification. The advantages of HDMI 2.1 are significant as the signal bandwidth can carry a lot over that HDMI cable (with a compatible display). HDMI 2.1 brings 144Hz support at a 4K resolution, as well as 60Hz at 8K.