Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...t-rtx-3060

Nvidia today announced that Resizable Base Address Register (BAR) support is now available for RTX 3060 graphics cards and RTX 30 Series laptops. That’s earlier than the company anticipated, but it comes with a caveat, because its other desktop GPUs aren’t expected to receive drivers that support the technology until “late March.”
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So what is Resizable BAR? Nvidia explained in today’s announcement that it’s meant to let the CPU  “efficiently access the entire frame buffer” by enabling as-needed transfers of textures, shaders, and geometry that can be processed concurrently rather than queued up. The result: improved performance. Maybe. In a few titles.

Intel’s GM of premium and gaming notebook segments, Fredrik Hamberger, told us that Resizable BAR support could lead to performance gains of 5-10% in some games. Nvidia said that “the performance benefits of Resizable BAR can vary substantially from game to game,” however, and that some titles actually performed worse. Support is also available for AMD CPUs.

This led the company to say that it “will be pre-testing titles and using game profiles to enable Resizable BAR only in games where it has a positive performance impact.” That’s resulted in RTX cards supporting just eight titles, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Red Dead Redemption 2, with the initial driver that was released today.

Nvidia said it plans to expand Resizable BAR support to additional games when it rolls the feature out to more of its 30-series graphics cards next month. For now, though, it seems like the company’s support for the technology will only affect a very small portion of its customers. Let’s see if it raises the (resizable) bar later on.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index

There's perhaps some light at the end of the tunnel, though — faint and distant light, but these things can change quickly. After hitting a peak price of over $58,000 for Bitcoin and $2,000 for Ethereum, both have dropped a bit in the past few days. Mining profits from an RTX 3060 Ti now sit at an estimated $5.67 per day, which means it would take 213 days of 24/7 mining to break even at current rates, and the RTX 3080 has an estimated $8.84 per day in profits (after power), so it would require 232 days to reach the break even point (based on eBay's median pricing for the past week).

Ethereum difficulty continues to rise as well — it went up 5% in the past week — which means every GPU used for mining will make proportionately less money. What would really help GPU prices most is a big drop in cryptocurrency valuations, which has happened a bit this past week, but there's a long way to go. Bitcoin dipped by 5.4% over the past week, and Ethereum dropped 14.4% (that's from one week ago, not from the all-time high during that time frame). If both trends continue, sometime in the next month or two miners would likely stop investing in more hardware.

Meanwhile, Nvidia just announced that it made "$100 to $300 million" in estimated sales to cryptocurrency miners just in its last quarter. Let's be honest: It was probably a lot higher. Actually, that was for Q4 2020, so perhaps not, but miner sales in Q1 2021 probably account for at least half of all GPUs sold. That's just a guess, but given the massive spike in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices, it wouldn't be at all surprising. At least the new RTX 3060 12GB isn't a particularly attractive mining option, though that didn't stop it from selling out.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...060-review

Unlike the previous Ampere GPUs, Nvidia won't offer an RTX 3060 Founders Edition, so we're looking at a third-party card. Nvidia shipped us the EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC for this launch review, a reasonably compact and relatively unassuming card. There's no metal (or even plastic) backplate, no RGB lighting, and two custom-sized 87mm fans for cooling with a 2.0-slot form factor. The card measures 202x110x38mm and weighs 653g, which is quite the change of pace compared to the other third-party Ampere cards we've reviewed so far.
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Overall, the 3060 ended up 20% slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, and 27% slower than the RTX 3070. That's a bigger drop as you go down the GPU hierarchy, giving you proportionally less performance for your money — not a good thing. The RTX 3060 is also just 20% faster than the RTX 2060, and 7% faster than the RTX 2060 Super. Of course, 1080p is a low hurdle to clear and CPU bottlenecks come into play. Let's quickly go through the individual 1080p game charts.
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Increasing the resolution to 1440p doesn't radically alter the overall relative standing of the RTX 3060. Actual performance drops by 25%, and it's now 22% slower than the 3060 Ti on average, but it's also 24% faster than the RTX 2060 and 8% faster than the 2060 Super. Factory overclocked cards will do a bit better, but even though the card technically has 3584 GPU cores, compared to Turing it behaves more like a card with about 35% fewer cores (due to the shared FP32/INT32 cores).
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4K gaming proved to be a bit much for the RTX 3060, at least if you're hoping for 60 fps gameplay. Some games can get there, especially if you're willing to drop the settings a notch or two, but at our Ultra settings only two games in our suite managed smooth framerates: Forza Horizon 4 and Strange Brigade — neither of which are particularly demanding. A few others came close to 60 and should be fine with a G-Sync compatible monitor, but several games struggled to stay above 30 fps, and both games with ray tracing enabled (but no DLSS) dropped well below 30.

The 3060 fell 23% behind the 3060 Ti, but it also beat the 2060 by 32% — a bit of a pyrrhic victory, considering the actual fps, but having double the VRAM certainly helped. If you're hoping to game at 4K native, we recommend stepping up to a more potent graphics card. Or you could do what the latest consoles do and shoot for 30 fps with dynamic resolution scaling. Basically, the RTX 3060 looks to be roughly the same level of performance as the PS5 GPU.
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We can't predict the future, but all we have to do is look at current resellers and places like eBay to know that, no matter what Nvidia does to hinder mining performance, the GeForce RTX 3060 is going to sell out. You basically can't buy any RTX 30-series or 20-series card on Newegg right now at less than double the original launch prices. The same goes for AMD's RX 5000 and RX 6000 series cards, and even the GTX 16-series GPUs. If you can find an RTX 3060 on sale today for less than $400, grab it fast — heck, buying one for $500 would still be a better deal than the $800 RTX 2060 Supers we've seen floating around.

Sadly, this is likely to be yet another product that won't be able to meet the demand for it any time soon. We hope we're wrong, we really do. But hope doesn't get you a shiny new graphics card.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/32032...strictions

Getting a new GPU is almost impossible right now, with prices skyrocketing as supply continues to lag demand. Nvidia has already announced some steps to separate cryptocurrency applications into a new product category, and it’s even got a new gaming GPU that blocks high-speed crypto mining. During the company’s recent earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress hinted that more gaming GPU restrictions could be coming.
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In discussing the shortage, Kress noted that Nvidia has limited hash rates on GPUs “starting with the 3060.” That strongly implies future GPUs will come with similar restrictions, and the company did go out of its way recently to stress that it would not nerf any existing video cards. Nvidia’s desire to keep the gaming and mining markets separate supports the idea future cards will have mining limits, as stressed by CEO Jensen Huang. “I think proof of work is going to be around for a bit,” he said, referring to the workloads that miners run to unlock new digital money. “We developed CMP for this very reason.”

It plans to ship approximately 15 million CMP cards for industrial miners in the first quarter of the year. That might help get GPUs back on store shelves for gamers, but the trend of splitting mining and gaming might not appeal to everyone. Hopefully, Nvidia leaves at least some product lines alone — if you’re spending big on a flagship GPU, it’s reasonable to expect it to be unencumbered by artificial restrictions of any kind.