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Forums - PC Discussion - Nvidia Ampere announced, 3090, 3080, 3070 coming later this year

just imagine pc gaming being as big as the console market with many AAA titles taking full advantage of such a machine gpu, in an ideal world where many high end gpu/cpu set ups. There would be such an advancement in games. Just a shame cards like these won't get fully utilised. Is it even worth buying thes high end 3000 series even for next gen?



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haxxiy said:

I wouldn't be so fast to claim that, since it seems like Ampere flops are a very different beast from Turing flops, assuming these are FP32 flops at all. I'm thinking something like Terascale to GCN, but in reverse.

According to the benchmarks above, the 8,704 Ampere Cuda cores of the RTX 3080 perform closer to ~ 5,000 - 5,500 Turing Cuda cores, clock per clock. So they are just about 60% as efficient compared to Turing. I'm not sure how RDNA 2 would compare.

Edit - I do remember, years ago, that you were once mislead by Nvidia's PR speech and believed the Tegra portable was 1 TFLOP of FP32 too, so yeah.

Nothing like Terascale... Terascale is a very complex topic, but happy to break it all down and showcase the various approaches AMD took with VLIW5 and nVidia with Ampere.

shikamaru317 said:

Something feels off about the tflop numbers. 3070 seems like it will maybe be a 10-15% improvement over 2080ti, but they are saying that it has 7 more tflops than 2080ti. It's strange to see for sure, usually Nvidia flop numbers are on the conservative side, punching above their weight class and beating AMD cards which have higher flop ratings in gaming performance. But now all of a sudden they are advertising these massive flop improvements. At the same time, AMD seems to be trying to improve performance per flop as much as possible. It feels like a total reversal of the flops marketing from Nvidia and AMD that we are used to. 

That being said, 3070 will definitely beat PS5 and Xbox Series X. Rumor is Series X performance falls in between 2080 Super and 2080ti, and 3070 is above 2080ti. And PS5's GPU is weaker than Series X's. 

However, you also have to remember than 3070 is $500 for just a GPU, an entire PC built around a 3070 will probably cost you around $1200. Series X and PS5 will be $500 tops, they will still be price/performance kings later this year. 

Teraflops are only part of the story, you have an entire GPU sitting behind the FP32 capability of the CUDA cores like Integer calculations.
Way to much emphasis is placed on flops, it's only ever been a "theoretical" maximum anyway, not a real-world result... And it tells us nothing of efficiency.

Wyrdness said:

The's more to it than TFlops as for a start AMD TFlops aren't the same as Nvidia's which is why the 2080Ti is so significantly above the 5700xt another thing is features like dlss and such which reduce required power for better output as seen in Death Stranding's PC version you can play and have 4K visuals at 60fps with out actually having to run the game at 4K.

AMD and nVidia's Teraflops are actually identical.
They are both single precision (32bit) floating point numbers.

The issue is, you need more than just single precision floating point capability to render a game.

vivster said:

Ampere is using a new kind of shader that is able to execute two instructions per clock. This is similar to hyperthreading in CPUs. However it's of course less efficient in real world applications than having 2 full shaders. Nvidia now proceeds to treat those new shaders as double the shaders from which they also derive the FLOPS. This brings us into a bit of a predicament because now the shader count and FLOPS are not comparable to Nvidia's own cards anymore.

GPU's for years have always executed two instructions per clock... Which is why we always used the:
Clock Rate * 2 instructions per clock * Shader Pipeline algorithm to determine theoretical floating point performance...
I.E. Xbox Series X.
Clock Rate = 1825Mhz * 2 instructions per clock * 3328 shader pipelines = 12,147,200Gflop or 12.14 Teraflops.

What nVidia has done here is made each pipeline branch out into two.

Shader counts and Flops have never been comparable, it was always a coincidence that they lined up in comparisons.
It's always been a hypothetical maximum rather than a real-world capability.

Case in point you could pick up a Geforce 1030 DDR4 variant and compare it to the GDDR5 variant, identical Gflops... But the DDR4 variant will be half the performance... Which just reinforces the idea that there is more to rendering a game than how many flops you have.

For example, AMD has always had more "flops" than nVidia... But in gaming that didn't amount to much, why was that? Because games do need things like Vertex and Geometry operations to also be performed, games may use integer texturing as well.
In short it meant that nVidia had better gaming performance... However.
If you were to throw a pure Asynchronous compute task at an AMD GPU, it will switch into another gear and it will beat nVidia hands down, which is why AMD GPU's were such lucrative buys during the crypto-craze, they were pure compute tasks and AMD's GPU's were built better for that.

Otter said:

I mean when the price of the GPU is likely $300 more than the XSX/PS5 in their entirety, the power difference should come as no surprise. What I'm slowy realising though is how unprepared it feels for sony/MS to go into this generation with no built in image reconstruction features. It could be that neither wants to speak about it yet as it sounds like a power concession but that's unlikely.

Next-generation consoles have image reconstruction features.
The Xbox Series X has DirectML for example.

vivster said:

I think that has less to do with the willingness of the console manufacturers and more with the ability of AMD. I'm sure they would've loved a feature similar to DLSS, but I doubt AMD has anything to offer on that part. Which kinda is a shame because DLSS would be absolutely perfect for consoles who already struggle with performance and image clarity. Of course they could've gone with Nvidia, but that would've been a real mess technologically, economically and politically. Less so for Xbox, but still.

Alternatives to DLSS exist.
Radeon Image Sharpening for example.

KratosLives said:
just imagine pc gaming being as big as the console market with many AAA titles taking full advantage of such a machine gpu, in an ideal world where many high end gpu/cpu set ups. There would be such an advancement in games. Just a shame cards like these won't get fully utilised. Is it even worth buying thes high end 3000 series even for next gen?

These GPU's will be fully utilized.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

3070 looks like a amazing value. Looks like a great beast for 1440p gaming.
2021, perhaps 2022, for me to buy it... i think this cards will be that sweet spot in the coming years.



@Pemalite   
I got a question if you dont mind.
But what would bottleneck a gpu more when talking vram, its final bandwidth or it the amount of vram?
Obviously we want faster and more, but wich to prioritize?



It takes genuine talent to see greatness in yourself despite your absence of genuine talent.

CGI-Quality said:
eva01beserk said:

@Pemalite   
I got a question if you dont mind.
But what would bottleneck a gpu more when talking vram, its final bandwidth or it the amount of vram?
Obviously we want faster and more, but wich to prioritize?

Depends on the application. VRAM is a far bigger deal in the professional/render world vs gaming, for example.

I was mainly asking because of the 3070 and 3080 have the same amount but different bandwidth's. So im not sure if the 3080 would reach some kind of limit in some cases, where the 3070 would not as it would get there anyways. 



It takes genuine talent to see greatness in yourself despite your absence of genuine talent.

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Seems like my 1080 will be replaced with the 3080. Seems like a great upgrade.



KratosLives said:
just imagine pc gaming being as big as the console market with many AAA titles taking full advantage of such a machine gpu, in an ideal world where many high end gpu/cpu set ups. There would be such an advancement in games. Just a shame cards like these won't get fully utilised. Is it even worth buying thes high end 3000 series even for next gen?

You sound like you have never played on PC.

There has never been such a thing as PC GPUs not getting fully utilized. They are always too slow, no matter how high end you go. Even with a 3090 you will have games that make it barely to 4k60fps with RTX. High resolutions at high framerate are always a strruggle and now we have Raytracing which puts even the strongest GPUs to their knees.

Even if we got something right now that is twice as strong as a 3090 it wouldn't be satisfying enough for the length of a console generation. At the end of next gen people will already be looking to upgrade to 8k.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

If you want 4K, a 3080 is probably going to be hit and miss on Vram. Some games already go past 10, and others right on the edge.



vivster said:

Ampere is using a new kind of shader that is able to execute two instructions per clock. This is similar to hyperthreading in CPUs. However it's of course less efficient in real world applications than having 2 full shaders. Nvidia now proceeds to treat those new shaders as double the shaders from which they also derive the FLOPS. This brings us into a bit of a predicament because now the shader count and FLOPS are not comparable to Nvidia's own cards anymore.

GPU's for years have always executed two instructions per clock... Which is why we always used the:
Clock Rate * 2 instructions per clock * Shader Pipeline algorithm to determine theoretical floating point performance...
I.E. Xbox Series X.
Clock Rate = 1825Mhz * 2 instructions per clock * 3328 shader pipelines = 12,147,200Gflop or 12.14 Teraflops.

What nVidia has done here is made each pipeline branch out into two.

Shader counts and Flops have never been comparable, it was always a coincidence that they lined up in comparisons.
It's always been a hypothetical maximum rather than a real-world capability.

Case in point you could pick up a Geforce 1030 DDR4 variant and compare it to the GDDR5 variant, identical Gflops... But the DDR4 variant will be half the performance... Which just reinforces the idea that there is more to rendering a game than how many flops you have.

For example, AMD has always had more "flops" than nVidia... But in gaming that didn't amount to much, why was that? Because games do need things like Vertex and Geometry operations to also be performed, games may use integer texturing as well.
In short it meant that nVidia had better gaming performance... However.
If you were to throw a pure Asynchronous compute task at an AMD GPU, it will switch into another gear and it will beat nVidia hands down, which is why AMD GPU's were such lucrative buys during the crypto-craze, they were pure compute tasks and AMD's GPU's were built better for that.

vivster said:

I think that has less to do with the willingness of the console manufacturers and more with the ability of AMD. I'm sure they would've loved a feature similar to DLSS, but I doubt AMD has anything to offer on that part. Which kinda is a shame because DLSS would be absolutely perfect for consoles who already struggle with performance and image clarity. Of course they could've gone with Nvidia, but that would've been a real mess technologically, economically and politically. Less so for Xbox, but still.

Alternatives to DLSS exist.
Radeon Image Sharpening for example.

Then how would you explain the massive loss in efficiency of theoretical shader performance to real world from Turing to Ampere? Where's the bottleneck?

If I was Nvidia I would be incredibly insulted to have DLSS compared to RIS.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

eva01beserk said:

@Pemalite   
I got a question if you dont mind.
But what would bottleneck a gpu more when talking vram, its final bandwidth or it the amount of vram?
Obviously we want faster and more, but wich to prioritize?

You need to balance the two.
If you don't have enough Graphics Ram, the GPU will be requesting data from system memory and if the data isn't in system memory it will request it from the SSD or Hard drive and you will thus have a corresponding hit to performance, the Geforce 1060 with 3GB of memory is the perfect example of this.

But if you have tons of slow memory, then you are holding back the fillrate, the Geforce 1030 DDR4 is the perfect example of this as well.

Obviously the more bandwidth or the more memory you provide the higher the bill of materials.

eva01beserk said:

I was mainly asking because of the 3070 and 3080 have the same amount but different bandwidth's. So im not sure if the 3080 would reach some kind of limit in some cases, where the 3070 would not as it would get there anyways. 

The 3070 has 8GB @512GB/s of bandwidth.
The 3080 has 10GB @720GB/s of bandwidth.

There is one thing we need to keep in mind here though... The 3070 has 47.8% less functional units than the 3080, so it's bandwidth and memory needs are also that much less.

The higher the resolution you game at, generally the more video memory and bandwidth you want as well so you can keep all that data stored locally on the GPU.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--