Nvidia’s Upcoming 3000 Series GPU

Nvidiarecently confirmed that the launch of their new 3000 series Ampere GPU’s will be on September 2, a little less than two weeks away. Much has been speculated over the past year over every little detail that leaks out; from the size of the memory to the design to how much better they will actually be than the last generation of cards. While there is still a lot that isn’t known for certain, there is still quite a bit that has been confirmed and is definitely worth discussing, as Nvidia seems to be on track to really shake up the GPU market with this new generation of cards.

GeForce RTX™ 30 Series GPUs deliver the ultimate performance for gamers and creators. They’re powered by Ampere—NVIDIA’s 2nd gen RTX architecture—with new RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and streaming multiprocessors for the most realistic ray-traced graphics and cutting-edge AI features.

GeForce RTX 3000 Series Hardware

At the current moment Nvidia have not disclosed it’s Ampere white paper and I am going off of the info Nvidia has shared on it’s website and what Ryan Smith over at Anandtech has revealed in his article.

GA 102 and 104 fabrication node

Nvidia claim they have worked with Samsung to implement a custom 8nm node for it’s gaming Ampere line of GPUs. This is a departure from TSMC’s 7nm node they used for the GA 100. We only have limited information about this process – mostly because it hasn’t been used too many places – but at a high level it’s Samsung’s densest traditional, non-EUV process, derived from their earlier 10nm process. With rumored higher yields and lower costs, Nvidia with their custom hardware and massive GPUs needed this process to make a profitable lineup in this economically uncertain era.

“Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) are at the heart of NVIDIA GPUs, and our newest NVIDIA Ampere Streaming Multiprocessors are our best yet. Compared to previous-gen SMs on the Turing-architecture GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, new NVIDIA Ampere Architecture SMs offer 2x FP32 throughput for superior performance.“ So the doubling of cores may not be a mathematical double but rather 2 times more power powerful CUDA cores and hence Nvidia claiming this massive Cuda numbers. This fact will become clear once we get the white paper in our hands on September 17th.

2nd Generation Ray Tracing Cores & 3rd Generation Tensor Cores

NVIDIA made real-time videogame ray tracing a reality with the invention of Ray Tracing Cores, dedicated processing cores on the GPU specifically designed to tackle performance-intensive ray tracing workloads. On GeForce RTX 3000 Series GPUs, they are introducing 2nd Generation RT Cores, which have up to 2x the throughput. The Addition of 3rd Generation of Tensor cores hugely improves the AI functionality of the cards and makes DLSS a lot more performant, to the point that a 3090 can drive games at 60 fps and 8k with DLSS Quality mode.