[Hardware] Nvidia RTX 3080 and Ampere: Everything We Know

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The Nvidia Ampere architecture will be the next major upgrade for GPUs from Team Green, and will find its way into the upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 graphics cards. Or perhaps Nvidia will throw us all a curveball again and change the model numbers. Whatever. The GPUs should rank high on our GPU hierarchy and list of the best graphics cards. Ampere is coming to consumers, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the data center focused A100 on May 14 giving us a taste of what's to come. Here's what we know about Ampere, including potential specifications, release date, price, features, and more.

 

First, it's important to note that all of the rumors and leaks of the past year or so are unconfirmed, and any claims of pricing are complete fabrications/guesses. Outside of the GA100, Nvidia A100, DGX A100 and related parts, no concrete information has been released. No GPU company releases pricing details months in advance of a product's launch. Nvidia is very tight lipped about what it's working on, and the transition from the Turing to Ampere architecture is going to be particularly big for the company. For example, the GA100 GPU isn't the same as consumer models, and it has no ray tracing hardware, so while we can estimate where Nvidia may go on other Ampere GPUs, nothing is certain.

 

 

We're as excited as anyone about Nvidia's next generation GPU architecture, but we also want to separate fact from fiction. There's precious little of the former that can be proven, and potentially plenty of the latter, so take everything with a grain of salt. Let's also point out that Ampere is critical for Nvidia, on many levels. Recently, in it's Super Spring laptops announcement, Nvidia revealed that "15 million RTX GPUs" have been sold. That sounds nice, but damn if that doesn't seem awfully low for a GPU architecture that's been around for over 18 months.

 

The problem is that Nvidia doesn't normally provide hard data on the number of units sold. The current Steam Hardware Survey suggests that there are about four times as many GTX 10-series GPUs in the wild as RTX 20-series GPUs, but the statistics behind Steam's survey are opaque at best so we can't be too sure about real figures. Regardless, the attitude of many with RTX 20-series was to "wait and see," with the sage advice being that the first generation of any new technology — ray tracing hardware, in this case — might be interesting, but generation two will be where it really takes off.