Nvidia Ampere Discussion [2020-05-14]

Much higher if Nvidia's claim of 1.9x efficiency at some Turing performance level holds any water.

 

the arquitecture is totally different this time around, it's sooo hard to compare them anymore. The 3080 do more with less in some instances.

 

The whitepaper's here.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-30-series-ampere-architecture-whitepaper-download/
or directly:
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/...pere-GA102-GPU-Architecture-Whitepaper-V1.pdf

 

No mentions of any higher/new Tier level support of DX12_2. Ampere really seems like Turing 2X.

 

So it's finally official and I can say: RTX 3070 will be 6 GPC/96 ROPs. This was left out of the virtual techday presentations.

 

Watched some reviews. In modern games you get a 80 to 100% increase in performance going from a 2080 to a 3080. In RT this increases even more.
Older games show less of an improvement, seems the new GPUs are designed towards modern game engines. Power consumption is on the higher side of things, but still an improvement.
Not bad at all, it's one of the biggest leaps so far, DF compared it to the maxwell to pascall transition.

No idea about the TF numbers, i think they apply, the 3080 is a 30TF product afterall, but ofcourse modern game engines will take more advantage of the new arch then older ones. Would be nice to see UE5 benches on the new gpus.

 

Techspot spoke at length about the lack of scaling at 1440p. Their theory is that Ampere is too flops heavy and only gets to spread its wings at 4K. In turn they seem to think this means Ampere isn't a "gaming focused architecture".

It'll be interesting to see how close the 3070 gets with its 6GPCs at 1440p.

 

Versus 2080Ti, Horizon Zero Dawn at 1440p is 33% faster at 1440p, perhaps that's indicative of the future in terms of "rasterisation heavy" games? 43% faster at 4K.

Is it a badly optimised game as people have been moaning about for the last month or just too advanced for Turing?

 

It's gaming focused alright.
Just less PUBG or Fortnite focused - albeit this will probably change soon too with the latter getting RT/DLSS support.

It is a badly optimized for NV h/w game which is pretty apparent from how it loads Turing GPUs, don't see why Ampere would change this - it will likely be even less utilized in HZD than Turing with its FP32 SIMDs.

 

HZD is older then the other games tested though, it's a port, too. Try again.

 

Ampere has changed this though or are you just going to completely ignore the numbers? So it's not badly optimised for NVidia, merely Turing.

 

Architecturally Turing does seem better for gaming, and a lot more focused on it. My guess would be back when Ampere was started it was seen as Volta 2.0. Then RDNA1 did a lot better than Nvidia were expecting and so they bodged Ampere into a gaming release as best they could.

Glad they did, the 3080 is a really solid upgrade in cost for consumers, and however good or bad RDNA2 is architecturally AMD will still have to compete on price for performance. Competition is awesome! And who knows, maybe those rumors were right and a more game focused arch is already in R&D, waiting to go relatively soon.

 

Ampere builds on the strength of Turing. Doubling the FP32 throughput is a smart way to improve performance in games and application while not using transistors to scale up the whole chip. AMD will run in the same problems. Their CUs are not coupled with the geometry units and they wont have more bandwidth.

And most people wont care. Raytracing will widen the gap between Turing and Ampere more and more.

 

Has it? Looking at CB.de results it's +53%/+33% to 2080S/2080Ti in 4K which is lower for 2080S (+60% on average) and about the same for 2080Ti (+31%) when compared to average gains of Ampere over Turing.
Am I missing something? HZD scaling seems to be worse than average here which again points us to the direction of it being badly optimized for NV h/w in the first place - and it seemingly is even worse in utilizing Ampere over Turing.

 

Sure HZD might be an older game but it still has relatively modern graphics code and especially compared to some of the more recent games like AC Odyssey which still uses D3D11 ...

 

The 1.9x claim explained ...

September 16, 2020

 

I think it's fairly safe to assume that a game designed and optimised to run on mid range GCN1.1 is not too advanced for the fully DX12U compliant and vastly more powerful Turing architecture.

 

This wasnt mentioned in the ampere presentation

ACCELERATED RAY-TRACED VR AUDIO:
NVIDIA VRWorks Audio is a ray-traced audio solution that creates a complete acoustic image of the virtual environment in real-time, delivering physically realistic audio that conveys the size, shape, and material properties of the virtual environment. It’s accelerated on GeForce RTX’s new hardware-based real-time ray tracing technology, resulting in substantially increased performance and quality.

This is awesome imho it's basically an advanced version of EAX, lets hope they use it in more than just vr games.
ps: To Amd users how did TruAudio fare? I never own a compatible card.

 

TrueAudio got couple titles, TrueAudio Next is supported in SteamVR (don't know if games implement it or not), VRWorks Audio.. dunno

 

Sounds good but I guess the VR only aspect limits the appeal. VR positional audio is already pretty good.