Introduction

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3090 AMP Extreme Holo is the company's most premium custom RTX 3090 card. It comes with Zotac's highest state of factory overclocking, highest power limits backed by high-grade electrical components, most elaborate air-cooling solution, and RGB aesthetic with the most LEDs. The GeForce RTX 3090 remains the fastest GeForce RTX 30-series GPU money can buy. While NVIDIA insists that the RTX 3080 Ti is its "flagship" gaming GPU, the RTX 3090 is a halo product positioned a notch above. It continues to be better endowed in every way than the RTX 3080 Ti and has double the memory amount at 24 GB, letting the card handle certain professional-visualization tasks when paired with the GeForce Studio drivers.

The GeForce RTX 3090 "Ampere" is based on NVIDIA's largest GPU, the 8 nm "GA102," which it nearly maxes out, with 10,496 CUDA cores, 328 tensor cores, 82 RT cores, and a 384-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface. The memory ticks at a blistering 19.5 Gbps data rate, giving the GPU 940 GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with. The RTX 30-series Ampere graphics architecture heralds the second generation of RTX, NVIDIA's groundbreaking technology that brings real-time raytracing to gamers by combining traditional raster 3D graphics with certain raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, global illumination, and with this generation, even realistic motion-blur.



Even achieving this much requires a tremendous amount of computing power. NVIDIA uses fixed-function hardware called RT cores to perform the compute-heavy tasks of raytracing, such as ray intersection and BVH. AI, accelerated by Tensor cores, is used for de-noising. CUDA cores handle everything else. Ampere debuts the second-generation RT core with double the ray intersection performance and fixed-function hardware that enables raytraced motion-blur, third-generation Tensor cores that leverage the sparsity phenomenon in deep-learning neural nets to increase AI inference performance by an order of magnitude, and a large count of Ampere CUDA cores that offer increased IPC over the previous-generation, and concurrent INT32+FP32 math.

The ZOTAC RTX 3090 AMP Holo offers the largest version of the company's IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution that comes with a set of three aluminium fin stacks skewered by a mammoth eight heat-pipes and ventilated by three 100 mm fans. Some of the airflow from the cooler goes through the card and out vents along the periphery of the card at the backplate. ZOTAC is using a triple 8-pin PCIe power connector setup, and the Boost frequencies are rated at 1815 MHz (compared to 1625 MHz reference). Overclockers are also treated with consolidated voltage-measurement points and dual-BIOS via software switching.