Nvidia Ampere Discussion [2020-05-14]

Need to wait for retail version for benchmarks. The press copy has copy protection affecting performance which is not present in retail copy.

 

You think NVidia, the game's sponsor, has the press copy?

 

I would say, wait until tomorrow for performance benchmarks. It's one more day. No point in discussing unreliable internet rumours at this point. Even if that number is true we don't know how ultra compares visually to something lighter. Often ultra is huge perf hit with very minor increase in quality. This game has a ton of settings and effects to configure. There is multiple ray tracing effects, not only ray tracing on/off.

 

Rumor: NVIDIA's Next Generation 5nm GPU Architecture To Be Called Lovelace, Hopper MCM GPU Delayed? (wccftech.com)

 

Besides MCM is there anything exciting on the horizon? I imagine the next few generations will focus on performance and not features as lots of new features haven’t seen much usage yet (RT, mesh shaders, VRS).

The verdict’s still out on big GPU caches but maybe things will move in that direction.

 

Don't even know what features programmers would want anymore, hardware wise.

Also I'm not surprised at the mcm delay. It's a fundamentally different type of arch, and Nvidia hasn't really laid any groundwork for it.

 

There's still a lot more which can be done with RT in h/w.

 

Also here: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-rumored-to-introduce-gpu-architecture-named-after-ada-lovelace

 

I wonder how nVidia (and others) will deal with bandwidth needs. Big caches like rdna2 is not THE solution imo, because it take not a small amount of space, needed for more compute power I guess... That's why i've still Imagination Tech in mind and happy to see the TBDR still alive with series A and B. But I kind of live on the 90' where TBDR was a huge BW saver. Don't know how such an approach would do now.

 

Rumor: ASUS Confirms GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB & GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB ROG STRIX Custom Graphics Cards
December 25, 2020

ASUS Confirms GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 20 GB & GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB ROG STRIX Custom Graphics Cards (wccftech.com)

 

Blender 2.91: Best CPUs & GPUs For Rendering & Viewport
December 23, 2020

Blender 2.91: Best CPUs & GPUs For Rendering & Viewport – Techgage

 

NVIDIA AD102 (Lovelace) GPU rumored to offer up to 18432 CUDA cores - VideoCardz.com

 

btw kopite7kimi didn't say it is a leak or something.

"GA102 has a "7*6" structure. Maybe AD102 will get a "12*6" structure." So it's not a news or a rumor, it's nothing...

 

Wheter true rumor or not, they probably go all out with the RTX4000 series yes, doubling rasterization performance again, whilest ray tracing performance could recieve a massive jump even larger then last. Wouldnt surprise me if NV launches those to the end of 2021. Theres more competition and Intel seemingly trying to enter the market. This is the result of NV going on full steam.

Im going to wait untill the latter half of 2021 and get a new system. Theres no need to upgrade for anyone having a 2018 high-er end Turing pc for now, aside from 2077 on pc everything on PS5/XSX is basically cross-gen aswell.

A fast zen3 12core, PCIE4 nvme 14gb/s and higher (DS should be mature by then), and something like a 4070/4080 or rdna3 if it has proper RT by then seems a nice machine for next gen.

 

Well you still need a good process to make all that... And the bandwidth...

 

It’s weird, I’m not seeing a whole lot of bandwidth usage on the 3090 in a few games I’ve looked at in the profiler. As in it doesn’t go over 10% at anytime during the entire frame. Hopefully I’m interpreting the stats wrong.

None of the functional units on the chip really get anywhere near to full utilization though. Register usage gets maxed out sometimes but that’s not necessarily a bottleneck if there’s enough work to do. L1 usage seems to be the most obvious bottleneck as it hovers between 60 and 80% at times. FP and ALU usage basically max out around 50%.

It’s not really clear why they should consider scaling up the same architecture. There already seems to be a severe underutilization problem.

 

I'm still curious to see if a next-gen geometry pipeline like mesh shaders or a software rasterizer like UE5 will improve utilization by being able to generate fragments faster.

 

There were rumblings of a 3dmark mesh shader test on the horizon but I think Nvidia's Asteroid demo is the only thing out there so far. I just tried it and SM usage is much higher but it doesn't seem to be due to mesh shaders directly.

The most efficient workloads were the GBuffer and Fog passes with SM usage at 80-90% (purple graph). Mostly pixel shader (green) and compute (orange) under SM occupancy. Mesh shaders were relatively light (blue).

The deferred lighting pass seems to be very register limited. L2 hit rates are high throughout the frame.

FPS: ~31
Resolution: 5120*2880
Total asteroids: 302 thousand per frame
Drawn triangles: 92 million per frame
Max LOD triangles: 3.4 trillion per frame

 

@trinibwoy I wonder if Nvidia is pusing for 4k and now 8k because it's the easiest way to increase utilization. It does seem weird to essentially double ampere when utilization is so low, especially at common resolutions like 1080p and 1440p.

 

What about utilization during RT workloads?