The fastest RTX graphics cards are now alive, from Nvidia’s factory. New Nvidia Ampere GPUs, the successor of Turing are most powerful, that’s what we expect from the new-gen. Specifically, ray tracing performance has improved so much.
Nvidia claims “greatest generation leap” to these cards, and on paper, all claims look true. Likewise, the Geforce RTX 3070, RTX 3080, RTX 3090 performance graph shows a big hit over RTX 2000 Series.
One big question is how Nvidia achieved these numbers.
New Nvidia Ampere cards are yet to available for consumers, and independent reviews are just waiting for the embargo to lift. And speak something with the details that Nvidia provided, it’s too immature. But specs don’t lie and Nvidia has taken the two years of data to make their card magnificent after the first RTX launched. So we can definitely comment on “how ampere is better”.
Nvidia Ampere is better
Nvidia’s Ampere GPU is a 2nd Generation ray tracing cards, given that, great expectations come automatically. The new GPU core design has 2.7 times shaders, 1.7-time RT-cores, and 2.7 times Tensor cores than Turing. CEO Jensen Huang clearly stated for pascal users that “it is safe to upgrade now”. Not just price, performance is also quite compelling.
On Turing cards (RTX 2000), we get real-time ray tracing, and the amount of performance hit is awful. To covering the FPS, Nvidia integrated DLSS, which uses AI power tensor core to increase FPS. RTX + DLSS, performance improved. Unless you don’t have a high-end RTX 2000 (Like RTX 2080 Super or 2080 Ti) you could not get a good amount of FPS in ray tracing.
The problem of FPS and performance solved in Ampere RTX 3000 Cards. Nvidia claims the RTX 3070 a $500(₹51,000) card is faster from RTX 2080 Ti a $1200 card. And RTX 3080 a $700(₹71,000) flagship card, is 2 times faster than RTX 2080 while crushing the RTX 2080 Ti.
specifically, RTX 3070 Ampere card users can enjoy the RTX 2080 Ti level performance in games, with and without ray tracing in just $500 (₹51,000). This improvement is significant for Nvidia and gamers as well. Sadly, no such report shared for RTX 3090, basically 3090 is a replacement of the Titan card. So far we only know that the RTX 3090 is capable of playing games at 8K 60 FPS. This card is touted as “the world’s first 8K gaming GPU” at $1499 (₹1,52,000).
With the help of Samsung, Nvidia has designed a new custom 8nm Ampere chip, which is 1.9 times more power-efficient than Turing 12nm. Particularly, the new GDDR6X PAM4 memory type increased memory speed and bandwidth by multi-level signaling (No GDDR6X in RTX 3070).
Turing cards are not bad, but the performance uplift than pascal is not enough, hence users were confused. Thanks to Turing, because now we have a more mature RTX card on the shelf. From now ray-tracing really gonna be fun and will be affordable to every gamer.
In the time of Turing, we had not enough games supporting ray tracing and DLSS. With Nvidia Ampere, we have more and more games supporting ray tracing and DLSS, like the upcoming Fortnite, cyberpunk 2050, etc.
However, Ampere’s (RTX 3080 and RTX 3090) power consumption has notably increased compare to Turing. RTX 3080 has 320 Watt TDP and RTX 3090 has 350 Watt TDP. Need a bigger wattage size PSU than ever. The higher watt means more heat, to overcome this, Nvidia totally redesigned the RTX 3000 series coolers. The design looks innovative, minified the PCB to make room for better cooling.
The Story does not end here. surely you have to wait for independent review to ensure these claims by Nvidia.
Where is “Ti”
No Ti variant from Nvidia like RTX 20 series launch. Instead of Ti, we have seen RTX 3090, basically, it’s a Titan replacement. Generally, the Ti cards launch long after non-Ti cards, the RTX 2080 Ti is an exception.
For now, RTX 3080 is a flagship GPU, and it doesn’t mean we will never see a Ti variant or Super. At present, Nvidia’s Ampere cards are already at the top, way superior to their previous gen, so what’s the need.
Here is a thing, there is a big difference in price and specs between RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, there is room to play around with specs and price. Maybe Nvidia is waiting for AMD to launch it Big Navi RDNA 2 based GPU, and if the situation threatens, Nvidia could throw some cards to counter it.
Things like this happened before many times, history is witness. How Nvidia launched GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1070 Ti to counter Radeon Vega GPUs. Nvidia doesn’t want to lose its performance benchmark ground at any cost. The company learned from the past and even kept the new card prices competitive, not like RTX 20 series. The 20 series were horribly priced.
From a company perspective, it doesn’t make any sense to launch a card in its own competition.
Other features
Nvidia announced RTX I/O, the new GDDR6X memory is blazing fast than regular GDDR6, capable of moving more data in a given time. RTX 3000 series supports PCIe 4.0. It can take advantage of both faster memory and PCIe 4.0 to improving game load time.
PCIe 4.0 SSDs are very fast, so for game decompression, instead of routing whole data to CPU and Memory then GPU. The new cards can share some data directly from storage and decompressed in GPU memory itself, which reduces the CPU usage significantly.
Nvidia eliminated NVLink connector (SLI) support from the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. Only RTX 3090 has that NVLink connector for SLI just because its a Titan level card. This clearly indicates that Nvidia is not interested in multi GPU.
Nvidia Reflex technology is also cool, which can reduce the system latency for competitive games. In those games, every millisecond decides the loss and win situation. GTX 10 series cards will support Reflex technology, no worry.
For streamers, check out the Nvidia broadcast tool. Nvidia Broadcast allows you to do multiple things. By using Nvidia’s AI you can blur background, background noise cancellation, make a green screen effect on the background with precision, etc. Looks pretty good in demo.
Conclusion
So far everything looks mind-blowing, at least on paper. There are many aspects where we need more info, like the power draw, temperatures, sustainable clock speed, etc. For that, we have to wait a little more. Nvidia founders edition is pretty exciting this year, especially the new cooler.
