Zotac GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity – Lighter And Brighter Than Founders

Conclusion - Zotac GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity - Lighter and Brighter, But No Faster Than Founders

'Titan Class', that's what NVIDIA referred to the GeForce RTX 3090 as, not as the flagship but a 'Titan Class'. What does that even mean? The GeForce RTX 3080 was called the flagship, but this is also a GTX 30 Series and before the Titans were distinguished by that, the Titan branding, so what's the deal here? Well, it's not a dual GPU like the 90 class of the past so why the 90? Well, from my experience with this card it's occupying a very strange place in the market that I'm not sure would have made sense before this year. I'll elaborate.

More than ever before are people working from home in many different industries, that's just a fact of the world right now. Many of those people working from home are editors, designers, and modelers who also play games. Typically the Titan would come in as that between consumer and professional card, a bit less expensive than the Quadro line but carrying the higher VRAM capabilities and still being able to push the envelope as the absolute absurd top tier gaming card for those who are crazy enough to shell out for it. Well, the GeForce RTX 3090 is more along the lines of catering to that person but also doing so at a much lower price point than what they did the last go around.

What you're getting here is an 82 SM packed GPU with 10,496 CUDA Cores, 328 3rd Gen Tensor Cores, 82 2nd Gen RT Cores, and a mammoth 24GB of GDDR6X all for a grand total of $1499. To put that in a bit of market perspective the GeForce RTX 2080Ti 11GB came to retail at $1199 and in order to get a 5-6% performance boost along with 24GB of GDDR6 you were going to spend $2499 for it. The performance jump from the RTX 3080 to the RTX 3090 in gaming applications fell between 10-15% which is modest but better than the previous upgrade and coming in quite a bit less expensive. I'll wrap up on those concerns toward the end here.

Where the GeForce RTX 3090 shines is in the world of creative professionals who know they can put that massive VRAM pool to use for more than just gaming. Working with 8K Raw Footage in Davinci Resolve was a breeze on the RTX 3090 as well as the Titan RTX, but the RTX 3090 was able to present that experience for a savings of a smooth grand. VRAY performance on the new Ampere architecture is through the roof, same goes for OctaneRender so long as you have the VRAM to support it otherwise you'll find yourself stumbling. Blender really benefits from the architectural improvements and shows quite the speedup over the Titan RTX when the other cards just don't have the VRAM to keep up.

But does the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity change the story much from the Founders Edition? Not really. It's a more traditionally designed graphics card without being the size of a lunch box, but still more than the 2 slot offerings we're used to. The card is indeed brighter with clean and bright aRGB running down the side (at the cost of higher power draw to keep it shining). A much more common 2x8-pin connection makes it much easier to stomach when setting up in an install. But, it does pull more power, runs a bit warmer, and performs the same as the Founders Edition. That would be a problem if it cost more, but it doesn't since it's coming in at the MSRP.

The biggest letdown for the Zotac Gaming RTX 3090 Trinity is in its inability to have any room for increasing power for those who want it. Since it ships right at the power limit of the card you'll have to resort to undervolting if you're wanting to tinker. The good thing with that is you'll in store for very little performance hit but be able to shave about 6C+ off the thermals of the card and drop the power draw down into RTX 2080Ti AIB model realm while still seeing a substantial increase in performance over the old models. Now, if NVIDIA would just give the RTX 3090 the Titan class drivers it deserves this would make for a killer work by day, game by night, professionals heart and soul graphics card.

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