Ampere Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

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

Let's be clear: the GeForce RTX 3090 is now the fastest GPU around for gaming purposes. It's also mostly overkill for gaming purposes, and at more than twice the price of the RTX 3080, it's very much in the category of GPUs formerly occupied by the Titan brand. If you're the type of gamer who has to have the absolute best, and price isn't an object, this is the new 'best.' For the rest of us, the RTX 3090 might be drool-worthy, but it's arguably of more interest to content creators who can benefit from the added performance and memory.
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The interesting thing is that as fast as the RTX 3090 is, Nvidia could have gone faster — for a higher price, naturally. TSMC's N7 and N7P nodes are in full production now, and Apple has chips coming off the N5 node. Samsung's 8N is more like 10nm++ and is a step down in density and power requirements. But with a line of buyers already soaking up TSMC's more advanced nodes, it can afford to charge more. Samsung was clearly a better value prospect for Nvidia, and at least for the RTX 3080, we end up with an extremely impressive GPU at a not-entirely-unreasonable price. The RTX 3090, meanwhile, claims the top honors for performance for anyone who's willing to pay for it.

Given what we've seen of Ampere so far, we're also excited to see what Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 will have to offer. We're still skeptical about it matching the RTX 2080 Ti performance in all games, but it should come close, and at a much more affordable price. It's also a 220W part, so you won't have to worry about a PSU upgrade if you have a relatively decent build.

The wildcard in the best graphics card competition is AMD's Big Navi. Current details say there will be 80 CU models with 16GB of memory, but on a 256-bit bus. The ray tracing performance for RDNA2 is also a massive question mark — Nvidia's Ampere can be up to twice as fast as Turing in some ray tracing tasks, while there are hints from the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 that suggest AMD might be taking a far more cautious approach to ray tracing.

Either way, we'll find out what those other cards can do soon enough. The RTX 3090 will probably remain at the top of the GPU benchmarks and performance hierarchy unless AMD can pull a rabbit out of its hat, but RTX 3080 levels of performance aren't out of the question. If AMD can come close to RTX 3080 or maybe even exceed it, at a lower price, that would be very interesting.

For gamers, waiting for the dust to settle — and inventory to build up — is a better plan than shelling out $1,500 for the RTX 3090.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gbt-rt...-3060-12gb

Inadvertently, Gigabyte may just have confirmed the existence of not only a 20 GB RTX 3080 Ti but also a 12 GB RTX 3060 card. That may not sound like a big deal at face value, but if you ask me, it's something that's certainly worth getting excited about.

The information comes from a new EEC listing -- one that covers a plethora of cards. Details are scarce at this time, but the following product names tell enough of a story:
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But what makes these high-capacity cards interesting is their likelihood to stand up to the test of time. It's no industry secret that Nvidia's cards often lead the charge when it comes to running today's titles, but many also believe that AMD GPUs tend to 'age like a fine wine' much better. The reason for that is that AMD happily chucks more memory aboard its graphics card designs than Nvidia does, which helps with future games that require larger buffers.

So if you're like me, and you keep your graphics cards for a long, long time, then it might be worth the patience to sit on your pennies a little longer for these cards to come out.

Earlier rumors indicated that the RTX 3080 Ti might just pack the same 10,496 CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. However, no information is available yet about the GPU configuration of the alleged RTX 3060 -- though the word on the street is that it will come in 6 GB and 12 GB variants.

With these EEC listings up, chances are we'll be seeing the aforementioned cards announced soon. Of course, for official information, you'll have to sit tight a little longer until Nvidia's announcement comes around.

https://www.techpowerup.com/276554/ether...ds-spotted

Availability for NVIDIA and AMD's latest graphics cards is dire, to say the least; the average consumer finds their stocks to be spotty, at best, with available cards quickly dropping into oblivion. Scalpers and their associates are part of the problem, as is already well-known; however, another element to this same problem - at least, when it comes to numerous graphics cards finding their way to the same consumers, instead of being available for others - is mining. Because while we are definitely not facing the same shortages as we were back in the day where everyone and their mother wanted to get into mining using our tried and true graphics cards, mining farms are still a reality, and they are making use of NVIDIA (and AMD's) latest graphics cards as well.

Case in point, a mining farm running as many as 78 PNY RTX 3080 graphics cards has surfaced in Las Vegas. This 78-card mining farm was apparently put together with a $100,000 budget (around $1,199 per card, not considering other installation costs). For that money, the mining farm should be capable of around 6,474 MH/s (83 MH/s per RTX 3080), which amounts to a monthly Ethereum production of around 17.3 ETH per month (pricing fluctuates, so we won't give an estimation on dollar value for each ETH). Associated electricity running costs with such a system, including cooling, should pan out around 23.4 kW (with an estimated 300 W of power for each card) at $8.34 per Kw.