And here it is: we have the official specifications for Nvidia's second-generation RTX architecture. And in a somewhat surprising move, not only did we get pricing information at the same time, but Nvidia has made it a fundamental tenet of its new lineup. While it may not be the fastest card in the lineup, it is the RTX 3080 that Nvidia is trying to get gamers' attention.

The $499 Nvidia GeForce 3070 is an upper-mainstream contender, while the RTX 3090 is more expensive at $1,499. the RTX 3090 is a top-end card, but it won't have the same impact as the 2080 Ti. However, if you really want to get the best of the best, it is an option.

Getting back to the RTX 3080, what do you get for $699?

According to Nvidia's own performance figures, you get twice the performance of the RTX 2080 and a significant lead over the $1200 RTX 2080 Ti for $500 less. This is not a bad deal by anyone's standards. Of course, we'll have to see if that performance translates to the real world, but I certainly commend the return to vaguely normal pricing.

In case you forgot, the powerful GTX 1080 Ti is also available for $699, which is still quite a bit of money, but seems like a fair price to charge for a flagship product.

If your budget is not that tight, the $499 RTX 3070 would be welcome news. On the same performance chart, the RTX 3070 stays at the same level as the RTX 2080 Ti, even more so if it has the glorious words "FASTER THAN 2080 Ti" below it.

While this would be unbelievable if true, let's wait until we have 3070 in the lab again before rushing out to buy it.

The rumors about the price were not off the mark, but the shift in focus was unacceptable: at $1,499, the RTX 3090 is clearly too rich for most people. It is for those who need the fastest card, but it is not a mainstream product.

This pricing could also be indicative of what AMD is preparing for. This pricing suggests that Nvidia's dominance in the graphics card market is about to change.

To some extent, Nvidia was able to charge whatever it wanted for Turing GPUs because there was nothing else in the industry that could compete (not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of feature set.) Ampere is not only competing with Turing, but also with AMD's RDNA 2 participate in the real-time ray tracing rodeo, as well as Intel's Xe (although it won't join until 2021). [However, the price of $699 for the RTX 3080 may indicate that Nvidia is respecting what AMD has done with RDNA 2. We'll have to wait and see how that turns out, but being first out of the gate with a "reasonable" price point is likely to bode well for Nvidia.