The Ampere architecture announcement is still set for May 14 at GTC 2020 , but NVIDIA will not present the RTX 3080 Ti until later this year . We do not have an official date yet, but the latest information points to September or October, which would leave us with a launch for the end of the year. If everything goes according to plan, the graphics card should come with the RTX 3080.
Last week we shared with you a good dose of information about the RTX 30 series that, in general, remains, although it has received an important update with some changes and news that are worth highlighting and treating in a new article. The first thing to keep in mind is that the forecast of improvement in the CPI is reduced, which goes from between 10% and 20% to a fixed 10%.
Despite that negative change, the forecasts for the huge increase in ray tracing performance remain. This means that Ampere will multiply the Turing performance by ray tracing by four , but what about the performance in rasterization? According to this new information, the RTX 3080 Ti will be up to 70% more powerful than the RTX 2080 Ti (in the best possible scenario), and up to 40% more powerful than that in the worst possible scenario.
Possible Specifications of the RTX 3080 Ti
- 5,376 shaders.
- 336 texturing units.
- 96 raster units.
- 168 RT cores.
- 12 GB of GDDR6 at 18 GHz.
- 864 GB / s bandwidth.
- Up to 2.2 GHz frequency on the GPU.
- 21 power TFLOPs.
- Two 8-pin power connectors, with a TDP of 230-250 watts.
- Compatible with PCI Gen4.
The RTX 3080 Ti will feature a new cooling system based on three fans and will have a simplified construction that will seek to reduce costs without affecting quality. As planned, it will be manufactured in the 7nm process , although it is said that the mid-range models of the Ampere series will use the 8nm manufacturing process.
In terms of performance, this new filtration highlights that Ampere will no longer have to choose between one of the three improvements that ray tracing offers: global illumination, shadows and reflections , since it will have enough power to work with ray tracing applied simultaneous to these three technologies, and their impact on performance will be less compared to what we have seen in Turing.
It may seem exaggerated, but if Ampere really multiplies Turing’s ray tracing performance by four it would be perfectly viable. On this matter it is important to remember that NVIDIA will, in theory, double the ratio of tensor cores for each SM unit, which in the case of the RTX 3080 Ti would leave us with a total of 168 RT cores. To give you an idea of what this means, I remind you that the RTX 2080 Ti has 68 RT cores.
We will keep an eye on the online event that NVIDIA will offer on the occasion of the GTC 2020 and we will tell you all the key news about Ampere, an architecture that, we remember, will compete with the Radeon RDNA 2 series from AMD, which as we know has been used on the consoles of new generation and whose debut is scheduled for later this year.
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