Question 'Ampere'/Next-gen gaming uarch speculation thread

[Ottonomous]

How much is the Samsung 7nm EUV process expected to provide in terms of gains?
How will the RTX components be scaled/developed?
Any major architectural enhancements expected?
Will VRAM be bumped to 16/12/12 for the top three?
Will there be further fragmentation in the lineup? (Keeping turing at cheaper prices, while offering 'beefed up RTX' options at the top?)
Will the top card be capable of >4K60, at least 90?
Would Nvidia ever consider an HBM implementation in the gaming lineup?
Will Nvidia introduce new proprietary technologies again?

Sorry if imprudent/uncalled for, just interested in the forum member's thoughts.

 

[jpiniero]

Do 1.5 GB dies even exist?

 

[Stuka87]

2 GB GDDR6 chips appear to nerf bandwidth on the Radeon Pro RX 5700: 384 GB/s (12 GT/s) instead of 448 GB/s (14 GT/s) on the regular versions.
Though NVIDIA Turing isn't affected even on the Quadro RTX 8000 48 GB, with 2 GB and double-sided memory: still 14 GT/s vs GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

I guess it will be 1 GB chips for Ampere (12 GB on 384-bit) to get higher bandwidth: the alleged >18 GT/s for GeForce RTX 3080 and 3080 Ti/3090.

The slower memory speed could be a cost cutting request from Apple. The card isn't intended for gaming, but for video/modeling work. Where the bandwidth is less important than capacity.

 

[amenx]

AMD's now shipping 16GB 5700XTs for iMacs: https://www.techpowerup.com/270653/...ics-performance-to-updated-27-inch-apple-imac

If nVidia only ships 10-12GB on high-end Ampere, that's utter garbage.

Well supposedly Ampere is using tensor cores to compress much more data than before into memory. If the leaks are true, this would shave off some 20-40% of GPU memory usage. Not sure what specific case usage the 5700xt would need 16gb vram for.

 

[Veradun]

2 GB GDDR6 chips appear to nerf bandwidth on the Radeon Pro RX 5700: 384 GB/s (12 GT/s) instead of 448 GB/s (14 GT/s) on the regular versions.
Though NVIDIA Turing isn't affected even on the Quadro RTX 8000 48 GB, with 2 GB and double-sided memory: still 14 GT/s vs GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

It isn't a tech limitation, it's just they are cheaper and consume less power, i. e. it's a choice

 

[KentState]

What is the use case in the life cycle of the Ampere consumer cards for more than 12GB? Specifically, if something like a 3080 Ti is sold as a gaming card, is there anything within the next 24 months that would need it?

 

[Mopetar]

Probably not the next 2 years outside of some insane resolutions or high quality texture packs, but there are people who keep these high end cards for more than just two years.

I also think that with the most recent consoles targeting 16 GB (the Xbox has 10 GB optimized for GPU use) that we'll see developers target a higher baseline for future games.

It would seem odd for NVidia to make a premium product in all other ways but skimp on additional memory. Maybe they do have some magic tech that lets them get around that to a degree, but a lot of people just look at numbers and conclude that bigger equals better.

 

[Bouowmx]

Videocardz via WCCFTech

NVIDIA might also launch GeForce RTX Ampere graphics card with 20GB of memory - VideoCardz.com

NVIDIA is allegedly planning to introduce at least three memory variants of the PG132 board. NVIDIA PG132: 24GB, 20GB and 10GB It is rumored that NVIDIA might launch three variants based on the PG132 reference board. This board is rumored to be using NVIDIA GA102 GPU, the flagship gaming...

videocardz.com

Your memory wishes: 16, 20, and 24 GB variants
20 GB rumor from Chiphell

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'd guess that the texture/asset streaming that's a big part of the talk of the next gen consoles will need quite a bit of VRAM since it makes more since to punt it there vs system memory. Frankly, I think I'd be most excited if they talked about having like 512GB-1TB of NAND onboard where developers could do what they're doing on console (plus it'd be good for pro, video editing, CAD, etc).

 

[GodisanAtheist]

If staggered memory configurations substantially reduces the cost of the lower range models (i.e $799 for the 16gb model vs $1200 for the 24gb models) I am wholely in support of them.

I understand that NV wants their margins and their product differentiation and I hope they understand the public wants access to actual performance increases at more historic prices.

 

[DooKey]

If staggered memory configurations substantially reduces the cost of the lower range models (i.e $799 for the 16gb model vs $1200 for the 24gb models) I am wholely in support of them.

I understand that NV wants their margins and their product differentiation and I hope they understand the public wants access to actual performance increases at more historic prices.

Meh, as long as they maintain margins and continue to increase profits they could care less what the "public" of low price/historic price consumers want. I agree with them as a capitalist.

 

[Zstream]

Meh, as long as they maintain margins and continue to increase profits they could care less what the "public" of low price/historic price consumers want. I agree with them as a capitalist.

I whole heartily disagree. People are realizing you can’t upcharge during a turbulent year. The pricing must come down or otherwise risk losing market share. I’ll probably be proven wrong as idiots use stimulus checks to buy computer crap.

 

[KentState]

Sounds like the announcement will be in September.

Going to be an expensive few months with these launches and then the next iPhones in October. Will probably need to set aside $3k to pay for hobbies

 

[DooKey]

I whole heartily disagree. People are realizing you can’t upcharge during a turbulent year. The pricing must come down or otherwise risk losing market share. I’ll probably be proven wrong as idiots use stimulus checks to buy computer crap.

Disagree all you want. Sales and profits will determine who is right.

 

[BenSkywalker]

What is the use case in the life cycle of the Ampere consumer cards for more than 12GB?

Highly unlikely to be anything unless a developer goes out of their way to make it an issue(Crytek). There are only a few edge cases where 6GB cards struggle and people on these forums were saying they were dumb to buy years ago(in any situation where it has the power to use the setting, the RAM limitation is a non factor). It's highly unlikely we'll be seeing 8GB cards having trouble in anything but edge cases for years. People got used to RAM requirements roughly doubling every generation and some of them seemed to not notice that RAM requirements haven't been exploding, in fact they've been damn near glacial in recent years(for desktop, graphics, mobile, almost across the board).

I understand that NV wants their margins and their product differentiation and I hope they understand the public wants access to actual performance increases at more historic prices.

Full node drop, I don't think nVidia is going to prove as historically greedy as the other team with their full node drop. The idea of a 251mm part costing $400 may fly for the red team, but I don't think the green team would be as forgiving. If you care more about names it may be a bit different of course, I'm used to looking at die size(which gives us an idea of actual cost to manufacture) not marketing names. Price versus performance we should see a *MASSIVE* uplift compared to last generation. I'm expecting the $500 parts will be in the range of the current over $1K parts.

People are realizing you can’t upcharge during a turbulent year.

What country do you live in? In the US computer components, across the board, are insanely inflated right now if you can even find them in stock. I've done a couple of builds in the last few months- processors frequently 30% over MSRP if you can find them in stock, AIOs buy what you can when they show up(also roughly 30% over MSRP), mobos are closer to MSRP but the availability is not close to what it should be, PSUs..... for the love of gawd why was it impossible to buy a 750 watt platinum PSU- regardless of how far over MSRP you were willing to go(ended up having to get a 850 at WAY over MSRP).

Normally I stick to the same sites as everyone else, this year I get psyched when BestBuy has something in stock because they will actually be at MSRP which feels like a raging bargain in PC components right now.

I get what you are saying on a theoretical level, but a whole lot of people are spending a whole lot of money on computer components right now.

 

[beginner99]

People are realizing you can’t upcharge during a turbulent year. The pricing must come down or otherwise risk losing market share

Agree + consoles. That's why I think the cards will launch soon, before new consoles so that AMD and NV at least can milk us with their high end cards for 1-3 months. Once consoles hit and they cost like $400-$500, it will be hard for them to sell the same performance at $300. So we can argue they will have to drop console level performance to sub $250 price point, if not lower. So 5700XT level at $250.

EDIT:

I'm in the market for a new GPU. If they want to sell me console level performance at $300 or higher, I will simply keep my 290x (or at most replace it with an entry level with similar performance but much less power use) and buy a console for $400-$500 which probably will also work very well as a media player / HTPC.
Ulitmatley it all depends on console prices. If they are more expensive than usual (like $600 or more), well bad luck for us.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I whole heartily disagree. People are realizing you can’t upcharge during a turbulent year. The pricing must come down or otherwise risk losing market share. I’ll probably be proven wrong as idiots use stimulus checks to buy computer crap.

-Not sure about that, given how well digital entertainment companies have done through the pandemic. They could just as easily look at the landscape and say "we're the only entertainment game in town, pay us" and people will because they're not going to the movies or out to eat or to theme parks or anywhere else.

While a large chunk of America has no stable income, those folks weren't buying high end PC gear anyway. The ones that were likely still have their job and nothing to spend their money on.

All I can say is I am keeping my fingers extra crossed for a Maxwell -> Pascal shift and not a Pascal -> Turning shift in price performance, but its a toss up at this point.

 

[psolord]

-New consoles are coming and this time they will be good, since they copied the PC correctly.
-Jobs have been lost by the millions, due to covid.
-AMD will probably have good gpus since years.

And you are telling me Nivida will keep up their redacted pricing practices, to maintain their margins and pay their tribute to capitalism? Well you must first have sales, in order to have margins and capitalism. Good luck to them, if they keep having their heads up their butts!

Profanity isn't allowed in the tech forums.

AT Mod Usandthem

 

[beginner99]

-New consoles are coming and this time they will be good, since they copied the PC correctly.
-Jobs have been lost by the millions, due to covid.
-AMD will probably have good gpus since years.

And you are telling me Nivida will keep up their redacted pricing practices, to maintain their margins and pay their tribute to capitalism? Well you must first have sales, in order to have margins and capitalism. Good luck to them, if they keep having their heads up their butts!

A possible issue is that NV keeps high prices and AMD is supply constraint and hence simply goes along with them as they can't get enough wafers to support demand if prices were lower. I mean with the 5700 (XT) AMD pretty much did that.
At least that is my biggest fear. Not enough supply (and they both know it) and hence high prices. Albeit one would think NV should have a ton of supply at Samsung. Who else even used that process?

 

[jpiniero]

-New consoles are coming and this time they will be good, since they copied the PC correctly.
-Jobs have been lost by the millions, due to covid.
-AMD will probably have good gpus since years.

And you are telling me Nivida will keep up their redacted pricing practices, to maintain their margins and pay their tribute to capitalism? Well you must first have sales, in order to have margins and capitalism. Good luck to them, if they keep having their heads up their butts!

The FE cooler used on the GA102 cards is alleged to be very expensive, so I can't imagine they will be very generous on pricing.

I'm in the market for a new GPU. If they want to sell me console level performance at $300 or higher, I will simply keep my 290x (or at most replace it with an entry level with similar performance but much less power use) and buy a console for $400-$500 which probably will also work very well as a media player / HTPC.
Ulitmatley it all depends on console prices. If they are more expensive than usual (like $600 or more), well bad luck for us.

The 3060 having the same amount of shaders as the PS5 (2304) seems to be a good guess. I doubt that will be less than $350.

 

[BFG10K]

And you are telling me Nivida will keep up their redacted pricing practices, to maintain their margins and pay their tribute to capitalism?

Yes absolutely, because that's what happens when companies "compete with themselves".

Expect horrendous pricing across the board at launch (worse than Turing), with a backtrack only for the necessary SKUs where AMD is later found competitive.

The rest of Ampere will remain sky-high, like the entire Titan series since conception.

 

[exquisitechar]

Yes absolutely, because that's what happens when companies "compete with themselves".

Expect horrendous pricing across the board at launch (worse than Turing), with a backtrack only for the necessary SKUs where AMD is later found competitive.

The rest of Ampere will remain sky-high, like the entire Titan series since conception.

AMD will be "competitive" from top to bottom, but I wouldn't expect very generous pricing from them either. They're done playing the "severely undercut to grab market share" game and they're very supply constrained, so there is no reason to waste too many precious wafers on the GPU market, nor price their GPUs too low, obviously. Plus, laptops will be a priority with Navi23 and Navi22.

There certainly won't be any grand shake up in pricing this gen. We'll get beefier cards with more ALUs and higher clocks at every tier, as Samsung's 8nm process allows it. The pricing for each tier, though, I don't see being much different from Turing's in most cases.

 

[Bouowmx]

The 3060 having the same amount of shaders as the PS5 (2304) seems to be a good guess. I doubt that will be less than $350.

Where is the source for GeForce RTX 3060 specs? I tried looking in obvious places on Google, but I couldn't find it.

With the 3070 (A104) having 3072 cores, I expect the 3060 (A106) to have ~2048. I also expect it will be succeeding the GTX 1660 family (TU116) rather than RTX 2060 (cut TU106). As such, I expect 3060 to be ~300 USD.

 

[Mopetar]

Unless NVidia can meet demand at a particular price the only result of offering so-called "fairer" prices is that people will buy up cards to flip at higher prices. That was part of the reason that NVidia started selling FE cards in the first place.

GPUs don't behave differently than any other product or service and are subject to the same economic principles as everything else.

If they can get enough people to willingly pay the asking price for their cards then it's just as greedy for you or I to demand they sell for less. The reality is that if they did try to do that we'd just see the return of scalpers who buy up cards to resell at the same "unfair" prices. Why should NVidia let some middleman extract that extra profit?

If you want more value for your dollar then you need to hope that AMD has a monster product. Competition will do more to drive down prices then complaining about a company being greedy ever will.

 

[jpiniero]

Where is the source for GeForce RTX 3060 specs? I tried looking in obvious places on Google, but I couldn't find it.

With the 3070 (A104) having 3072 cores, I expect the 3060 (A106) to have ~2048.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (SUPER) and RTX 3070 rumored to feature GA104 GPU - VideoCardz.com

NVIDIA GeForce 30 Series Rumors On Twitter, the speculation on the upcoming GeForce 30 series is not slowing down. In fact, we are seeing increased activity in the leak and rumor space regarding the new series. Some Twitter accounts have been sharing even more information in recent weeks, which...

videocardz.com

Videocardz does indeed have GA104 having 3072 cores but the 3070 being slightly cut down to 2944, same as the 2080.

So I suppose it would make sense that GA106 would have the same count as TU106 (2304), only that it's an x60 instead of x70. They could do something like a 3050 Ti for $300 which would be roughly around the 2048 you mentioned.

 

[BFG10K]

AMD will be "competitive" from top to bottom, but I wouldn't expect very generous pricing from them either.

I doubt that very much. As of right now AMD has no answer to 2080, 2080S, 2080Ti and Titan RTX, hence nVidia prices them accordingly.

Also historically AMD usually had no counter to nVidia's top 1-2 parts, that's why nVidia created their own $1000+ price-point. You can only do things like that when you're "competing with yourself".

It's the same reason why Intel rehashed 4c/8t for 5+ years but magically added more cores as soon as Ryzen arrived.