Welcome to TechStuff, a production from I Heart Radio.

Hey there and welcome to TechStop. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I am an

executive producer for I Heart Radio and I love all things Tech and I'm just

back after a week off on vacation and I nearly forgot how my intro goes.

So that shows how my brain works.

But enough of that.

So I follow a lot of gamers and streamers and there's some folks I just you know find

really entertaining and when their love of games comes through on top of them being entertaining. I know I've really

hit something that appeals to me and in mid-September 2020 it seemed like every

single person I followed was chatting about something called the RTX 3090 or in some cases the 3080 and the gamers out there already know exactly where I'm headed on this one.

But while I love video games,

I'm not exactly dialed into the heart of hardcore

competitive gaming.

And so I had no clue what the heck this thing was. I mean I had an inkling but I had to look it up and it's a new high performance graphics card with a graphics processing unit or

GPU.

So today, I thought we would talk a little bit about

gpus in general, where they originated,

why they're important for modern games and why they can be so hard to get hold of

as well as so expensive and here's another interesting tidbit the main reason they're

hard to get hold of has nothing to do with video games.

We'll also cover why the RTX 3080 and the 3090 cards have had a, well let's call it a troubled launch.

Now, despite the fact that graphics cards have been around for more than two decades,

...