While we are only a few days away from the release of Nvidia's new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards, listings for the very powerful RTX 3090 have begun to appear on Amazon and Best Buy

Versions of the GeForce RTX 3090 are listed from EVGA and Gigabyte, offering "aftermarket" versions of Nvidia's own Founders Edition RTX 3090 These graphics cards promise enormous graphics power to drive next-generation games, with 10,496 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory under a triple-fan enclosure

The graphics performance of the RTX 3090 easily blows away Nvidia's last consumer high-end graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, as well as providing far more power than the PS5 and Xbox Series X

We already know that the Founders Edition RTX 3090 will cost $1,499, but third-party versions will be even more expensive, with the Gigabyte Eagle version set to cost $1,549,99 and the Gigabyte Gaming version $1,57999 In addition, building an RTX 3090 gaming PC will likely cost more than $2,000, as it will require a fairly powerful PC to take advantage of all the GPU power the new Ampere architecture has to offer [The price of the graphics card alone means you could buy three $499 Xbox Series X consoles and still have a bit to spare; PC gaming has always been expensive in terms of hardware, but this is certainly expensive

It is also worth noting that Gigabyte's graphics cards are air-cooled Therefore, aftermarket versions with fancier cooling systems, such as water-cooled systems, are likely to be even more expensive

For example, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Kingpin comes with twin fan radiators and a water cooling system Pricing for this card has not yet been revealed, but it is expected to be eye-poppingly expensive

However, if you are after the best technology that gaming has to offer and want a PC rather than a next-generation console, the GeForce RTX 3090 is the way to go It is ray tracing enabled and delivers games at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second It also promises to deliver 8K games in some cases

This makes it a very powerful and expensive piece of gaming hardware However, it should offer performance that will take years for other graphics cards and gaming technologies to catch up