Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31586...tx-2080-ti

Last generation, Nvidia raised the price of the RTX 2080 Ti to $1,200, nearly double the price of the GTX 1080 Ti. Now, the company is promising an RTX 3070 that can match the 2080 Ti and costs just 42 percent as much. According to new data released by the company and helpfully tabulated by VideoCardz, we can see exactly what improvements Nvidia is claiming:
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How accurate is this information likely to be? Pretty accurate. Companies don’t typically bother to show incorrect results they know reviewers will be able to disprove. What’s more typical is that they show accurate benchmark results, but cherry-pick the test and settings to showcase products in the most favorable light.

What do we see here? The RTX 3070 appearing to fully match the RTX 2080 Ti’s overall performance. At worst, the two GPUs are the same speed. At best — mostly in applications — the RTX 3070 can be 1.23x faster than the older card.

If we compare the specs of the RTX 3070 with the RTX 2080 Ti, this ranking makes sense. The RTX 2080 Ti has 4,352 GPU cores, 272 texture units, and 88 ROPs. The RTX 3070 has 5,888 cores, 184 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. On paper, we’d expect the RTX 3070 to potentially be even faster over the RTX 2080 Ti than Nvidia is claiming. So on the question of “Is Nvidia presenting cherry-picked tests?” I doubt it. The RTX 3070 is, on average, about 1.6x faster than the RTX 2070, so the upgrade value here is pretty strong, especially if you’re coming from a GPU like the GTX 980 or GTX 1080.

Of course, whether you’ll be able to buy one is anyone’s guess.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/31581...ot-debacle

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 sales were the worst examples yet of how badly online bots are damaging product launches, and the company wants to prevent a similar event from happening when it launches the RTX 3070. To that end, Nvidia will delay the RTX 3070 debut by two weeks, from October 15 to October 29, in order to build inventory and ensure an adequate supply of cards.

This is going to be an interesting stress test of the bot armies, OEM manufacturing, and retailer attempts to identify real orders versus scalpers. I’m not terribly optimistic about the outcome. As I wrote earlier this week, Nvidia has every reason to crack down on bots and scalpers, but other companies in the distribution chain don’t necessarily see things that way.

According to Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry.biz, Amazon apparently took no action to prevent people from buying pre-order stocks before immediately re-listing those exact same products for sale at a substantial markup compared with previous listings. Companies like eBay have no reason to attempt to block preorder scams and scalping, given that they literally make their money from online auctions and will earn more from an inflated sales price than a normal one.
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If the customer who bought 42 GPUs was an outlier, Nvidia is fine. If he represents the median bot purchase — or is even within one standard deviation of it — then we’re talking about bots sucking down 1-2 dozen cards apiece. If 1,000 to 2,000 bots can account for 12,000 to 48,000 video cards, it’s going to be much harder to overwhelm the collective credit limits and resources of the botters. Some scammers might take whatever profits they earned from the first wave of RTX 3080 and 3090 order abuse, then pour those profits into buying more RTX 3070s in the hopes of pulling the same trick again.

I’m glad to see Nvidia taking the situation seriously and I hope retailers and manufacturers do the same in order to make certain hardware gets into the hands of customers attempting to buy it as opposed to flipping it for profit, but the bots have definitely won Round 1 of our metaphorical match-up. Here’s hoping better detection methods and more inventory can hand a win to the good guys in Round 2. Nvidia has claimed the $500 RTX 3070 will outperform the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti, and that’s going to have a lot of people eyeing the RTX 3070 as a potential upgrade.

https://techreport.com/news/3473505/nvid...two-weeks/

The post doesn’t talk at all about what measures Nvidia might be taking or asking retailers to take to deal with one of the biggest problems with the 3080 launch, though. As mentioned above, a huge number of RTX 3080 GPUs ended up in the hands of scalpers via purchasing bots. Nvidia said in a postportem blog that it moved its store to a dedicated environment, increased server capacity, and added “pot protection” via CAPTCHA. The company also cancelled hundreds of orders snapped up by bots.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...until-2021

If you thought it would become easier to purchase an Nvidia RTX 3080 or 3090 by the end of the year, you might be wrong. And it doesn't look good for the RTX 3070, either. Today Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that the company expects the crushing shortages of RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards to persist through the end of 2020, saying:

"I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," Huang said. "Remember, we're also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the ‘Ampere factor,’ and then you add on top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we're going to have a really really big Q4 season."
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"The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue," said Huang. "The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected — and we expected really a lot."

"Retailers will tell you they haven't seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we've not seen in a long time, and we just weren't prepared for it."

"Even if we knew about all the demand, I don't think it's possible to have ramped that fast. We're ramping really, really hard. Yields are great, the product's shipping fantastically, it's just getting sold out instantly," said Huang. "I appreciate it very much, I just don't think there's a real problem to solve. It's a phenomenon to observe. It's just a phenomenon."
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Huang's assessment of the breadth of the shortage is similar to reports we've seen from several China-based media outfits that predicted the shortages would last until 2021. Those reports also outlined that we could see third-party graphics card makers create bundle deals that force users to buy a motherboard with the GPU to upsell customers. That hasn't happened...yet.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gamer-...nd-it-runs

The RTX 3090 might be overpriced for a gaming card, especially with 24GB of VRAM you will never fully saturate...or will you? Strife212 on Twitter had the genius idea of using that 24GB frame buffer to run Crysis 3, but not in the way you think.

Using a program called "VRAM Drive" Strife212 was able to make a 15GB virtual disk on the RTX 3090's VRAM and physically install Crysis 3 onto it, leaving 9GB of VRAM remaining for Crysis 3 to use as graphics memory, which is plenty for any video game by today's standards.

She reports Crysis 3 loads fast, and performance is really good (screenshot shows 75FPS). She ran Crysis 3 at 4k very high settings with VRAM utilization barely hitting the 20GB mark.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-a6...adro-cards
What's going to happen to PNY, since they made all of the Quadro cards?

Nvidia Quadro is dead, long live Nvidia Quadro. Following in the footsteps of the Nvidia A100 that replaces the previous generation Tesla V100, and the Nvidia RTX 3090, which we called the "heir to the Titan throne" in our review, Nvidia today announced two new graphics cards that have the power of the workstation-focused Quadro line, but not the branding. These are the Nvidia RTX A6000 and Nvidia RTX A40, and they each pack Ampere architecture with 10,572 CUDA cores and 48GB of VRAM.

We're not sure why Nvidia's dropping the Quadro branding, but much like the A100 and RTX 3090, it might be that the company's trying to centralize all of its new cards under a simpler "RTX + number" format. We don't know too much about these cards yet, from release date to specs to price. What we do know is that the cards will use 48GB GDDR6 VRAM, which is twice as much as the RTX 3090 but without the 'X' factor.
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The Quadro RTX 8000, which was the last high-end workstation GPU that Nvidia released, cost $5,800 at launch (and will still run you about $5300 to buy now), so don't expect either the A6000 or the A40 to come cheap. You can sign up to be notified of availability for both of these cards on Nvidia's website. Nvidia says the cards should begin shipping in December.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...validation

Coming hot off the heels of a potential RTX 3070 mobile GPU, a new post from twitter user @Avery78 (via Videocardz) shows a picture of Nvidia's desktop GA104-300 Ampere GPUs being validated for production. The picture originated from a user on the Baidu forums, but it has since been removed. As with all leaked info, though, we have to approach this with some caution, but it does appear to be legitimate.

The GA104-300 is assumed to be a cut-down version of the GA104 die, with 5888 CUDA cores, 184 TMUs, and 96 ROPS. This would be the RTX 3070 GPU, which features the same specifications. However, it could also be a different configuration for RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti. Two or possibly all three (3060 Ti) of those GPUs are expected to launch in the next two months, to compete with future RDNA2 products.
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Regardless, having RTX 3070 in full production comes as no surprise, as the RTX 3070 launches on October 29th. RTX 3060 and/or RTX 3060 Ti are likewise rumored to arrive by Black Friday, though Nvidia hasn't officially announced either part. Performance for the RTX 3070 should be somewhere around the RTX 2080 Ti as indicated by Nvidia's latest slide showcasing RTX 3070 performance vs the Turing generation. Let's hope the delayed launch will allow supply to surpass demand at least for a little while.