Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvi...0-review/7

Nvidia's last major launch was two years ago with the Turing architecture and RTX 20-series GPUs. Since then, Nvidia has released a slew of high-end, midrange, and budget offerings, plus the Super product refreshes, all built on TSMC's 12nm FinFET lithography. Meanwhile, AMD came out with its first 7nm GPUs in early 2019 with the Radeon VII and followed up with the Navi 1x RX 5700 series GPUs last July. One year later, Nvidia is finally ready to move beyond Turing and 12nm. It's about time.
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Anyway, saving $200 and buying a 3070 could make a lot of sense. It's interesting to note that the RTX 3070 is a substantial step down from the RTX 3080, however. The 3080 has 48% more GPU, RT, and Tensor cores, it has 20% more memory, and the memory is clocked 36% higher. That's a big enough gap that we could see an RTX 3070 Ti down the road, but at what price? Alternatively, wait and see what AMD's Navi 2x / RX 6000 GPUs can do, which we'll hear about more on October 28.

The bottom line is that the RTX 3080 is the new high-end gaming champion, delivering truly next-gen performance without a massive increase in price. If you've been sitting on a GTX 1080 Ti or lower, waiting for a good time to upgrade, that time has arrived. The only remaining question is just how competitive AMD's RX 6000, aka Big Navi, will be. Even with 80 CUs, on paper, it looks like Nvidia's RTX 3080 may trump the top Navi 2x cards, thanks to GDDR6X and the doubling down on FP32 capability. AMD might offer 16GB of memory, but it's probably going to be paired with a 256-bit bus and clocked quite a bit lower than 19 Gbps, which may limit performance.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-l...ampere-gpu

Asus (via Twitter user HXL) has inadvertently confirmed the memory specifications for Nvidia's forthcoming GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. Although we've heard multiple rumors of the graphics cards, Asus is the first Nvidia partner to acknowledge their existence.

Apparently, Asus has already added the ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3060 12GB and ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to its support database. The entries are at the bottom of the drop-down list, suggesting that Asus must have added the graphics card recently. The entries don't lead to anywhere, for now; however, the part numbers do lend credence to some of the rumored specifications that have made their rounds around town.
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Fortunately, Nvidia will reportedly offer the GeForce RTX 3060 with a 6GB setup as well, which will likely be the favorite flavor for many mainstream gamers. However, it would have been better if Nvidia had upped it to 8GB since 8GB is pretty much the standard in the contemporary gaming world.