What happens to RTX 20 series now that the 30 series is here?

RTX 30 series was introduced by Nvidia a few days ago, putting an end to the leaks and rumours. The GPU manufacturer introduced 3 cards; 3070, 3080 and 3090, all belonging to the RTX series.

Surprisingly, Nvidia just pulled an AMD on all us PC gamers as the cards were priced quite cheap and aggressively. The company revealed that the price of the founder edition of 3070 would be $499, 3080 will be priced at $699 and the 3090 will be priced at $1499.

The RTX 3070 will feature an 8GB GDDR6 memory, while the 3080 will feature a 10 GB GDDR6X memory running at 19 Gbps and the 3090 will feature a humongous 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. Quite impressive specs on paper. Moreover, Nvidia is claiming that the entry card 3070 will be 'faster than the previous-gen top card, the 2080Ti'. Also, the 3090 will be able to achieve '8K 60 FPS' in numerous AAA titles.

Quite the bold claims that Nvidia is making with their newer generation of cards.

Which begs the question: What will happen to 20 series cards and their owners?

First and foremost, it's a given fact that the coming of newer tech will always impact the value of the older tech in a detrimental way. However, the cards may have lost their value, but they haven't lost their performance. They will still perform the way they were performing before. We'll probably see a massive improvement in the Ray tracing department, but performance-wise the 3070 will not be that much faster than a 2080Ti. Still, getting a faster card at $500 versus a $1200 is a win-win situation in everyone's books who is a PC gamer.

PC gamers should be happy that Nvidia's monopoly is over and that AMD has finally shaken them out of it. They have priced the 30 series cards at a much better price for performance value ratio. Which leads to another hypothesis:
AMD is coming up with something of their own and it's going to be big otherwise, Nvidia has never cared for the competition before and set the prices as they deemed fit. If AMD had not entered the competition, by totally embarrassing Intel, Nvidia would never have priced the newer cards at such an aggressive price point. Nonetheless, Nvidia saw how Intel was clean swept in the processor department and didn't want to face a similar scenario, hence such pricing.

Moreover, as stated before the 20 series cards will still perform, in fact, they will also benefit from the software updates that Nvidia will roll out for the 30 series in the driver updates. Sure, they lost their value quite a lot. But 20 series cards owners can still weather out this gen of cards and game at 2K and 4K at the ultra preset because the cards have got the processing power for doing that.

The Way forward?

Right now, its just Nvidia claims that are breaking the internet. Got to hand it to Nvidia for their marketing tactics. Let's wait for official benchmarks and see how the cards are performing in real-life situations. Pretty sure the RTX 3090 will perform as expected with its monstrous specs, but the cards that will form the bulk of the consumer orders will be 3080 and 3070. Let's wait and watch how the situation unfolds.

Let us know in the comment section which card you will be upgrading to or will you be skipping this gen of cards because upgrading every gen is not the smart thing to do!