Nvidia Ampere Discussion [2020-05-14]

Looks like I did, which would make more sense. Thought this would also assume the yield on the GA102 chip goes up enough that they don't have to bin off all the 3080 chips they're currently using.

On another note, while all the problems with the 30xx series so far validate my hypothesis that it was a compute focused arch rushed into gaming duty, I didn't expect Nvidia to push anything like these problems onto their customers. Is it really as bad as this thread is making out, are there just a small percentage of bad boards or is it more widespread?

Either way the problems explain why Anandtech's review is taking so long. Good on them for, assumedly, putting in the extra work rather than rushing a review out the door to be relevant.

 

I think this is pretty good explanation of wtf is going on with crashing.

 

Looks like driver fixed the most prominent issue. No need to go hunting for board with specific capacitors. pcworld hard card that consistently crashed with old driver and no crashes with new driver.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3583894/nvidia-fix-rtx-3080-crashes-new-drivers-clock-speed.html

 

NVIDIA RTX 30 Fine Wine: Investigating The Curious Case Of Missing Gaming Performance

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-30-fine-wine-investigating-the-curious-case-of-missing-gaming-performance/

 

Oh the irony if raw (FP32) shading power becomes suddenly most relevant spec, after NVIDIA finally goes after that like AMD did many times with no luck

 

Let's assume that NVidia has a basically perfect GPU simulator that was used to design Ampere. This would mean the compiler is already "fully optimised" for game shaders' use of the ALUs. So it seems unlikely that existing games will "get better" due to the shader compiler and it also seems unlikely that console games ported to PC in the near future will be transformed by unlocked-math on Ampere, aging fine-wine style as the months go by.

Of course, in using this "perfect simulator", NVidia would have acted rationally in making Ampere. It's very tempting to be dismissive, but you'd have thought that a few hundred (at the very least) software guys who aren't fully committed to AI research were put on the job of coming up with things to do with Ampere's FLOPS.

Maybe ray tracing will turn out to consume lots of ALU cycles, as devs get deeper in to it. Cyberpunk 2077 could be a real showcase?

 

Maybe but with AMD being in both consoles again I'm not holding my breath.

 

The "investigative" article fails at the beginning when limiting themselves to the 3 possibilities.

 

That hunt is still on, though. Partially because there is still up to a 10-15% spread in achievable boost clocks, independent from the TDP limit.

And if someone claims that the driver fixed "everything" there are still a few weird reports of audio glitches (in analog soundcards) triggered by Gigabyte and some MSI models around the corresponding models top boost steps. Even though the cards themselves run stable at that point, now.

I'm still curious as to what NVidia actually did to the boost mechanic in order to patch it though? Reducing the noise by introducing a cooldown period in between frequency switches? Or just a simple "if crash, don't" logic which keeps the GPU in a failsafe state during the brownout?

 

You are giving me deja vu of Charlie claiming that Fermi was a compute focused architecture quickly adapted for graphics.. which was a huge pile of shit, when it was revealed that it was a geometry monster and shockingly outperformed HD5870 in tesselation.

 

Fermi was a compute revolution too... I don't know what Charlie said at the time, but compute focused doesn't mean it won't perfom well in games... For Ampere, my feeling is yeah it's a compute monster, but nvidia is pushing things that need compute / tensor cores, like dlss. Maybe their bet is that gaming and compute will get closer and closer in futur years, while amd decided to have 2 differents architectures (but at what cost for them ?). And right now it doesn't matter a lot, since nVidia is king in compute, AND gaming, so...

 

Ampere is "compute architecture" only in a sense that it's compute performance isn't fully tapped by current gen games yet.

And as for next gen consoles being on AMD again, this is irrelevant mostly - what matters is the change in compute to bandwidth ratio which these consoles will have in comparison to current gen ones.

 

https://www.igorslab.de/wundertreib...-gleich-noch-die-netzteile-verschont-analyse/
Analysis of what the driver update did.

Rough summary:
Driver update changed the boost strategy and applied undervolting to all cards.
With the most unstable cards, there were frequent, unfiltered, microsecond-range spikes of up to 600W all the way to the PSU. Frequency of these spikes has dropped significantly, and magnitude of the spikes has been reduced by ~70W (that's still 530W spikes if you have a bad model).
Impact is a 1-2% performance drop, and a moderate regression in frame times:

 

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/g...ely-due-to-poscap-and-mlcc-configuration.html

 

I have to say, this RTX 3080 launch is looking even worse than your typical Raja-era AMD graphics card launch.

And I don't mean this as a compliment to either company.

You managed to repost something you had already put a like on.
And @PSman1700 liked it twice, once on each post. I guess we now have the option to double-like posts on B3D.

 

Well at least it's still performing very well.

 

Raja-era launch? I thought last minute price changes and the vbios debacle were post Raja.

 

Yes, the performance delta with the new drivers seems negligible and the RTX 3080 cards still seem like good purchases assuming you manage to find one at MSRP.
I do think it's a bad idea to buy one right now even for die hard nvidia fans, as Navi 21/22 may trigger nvidia to lower their current prices and/or launch the super/Ti versions with more VRAM at the same price as the current one.
I guess it's like the most level-headed reviewers are saying, "if you really need a card right now and you can find one then go ahead, otherwise you should wait".


Though the late electrical engineer in me can't stop feeling wary of what seems to be capacitors being saturated on day one, to the point of SoC failure. Now the SoC isn't failing, but I wonder if those capacitors are being driven at healthy load levels.
I didn't see der8auer's video, though. He might have provided further insight on this.

 

How is that comparable? If anything you could compare this to the 'PCIe gate' on RX400 series launch. The difference of course being PCIe slot power draw slightly above spec caused no issues whatsoever. And yet I still remember tech media grilling AMD to no end.

 

There's something else I'm a bit worried about, EMC. We do have reports of glitches induced into sound cards, and just going by the numbers, this is still likely to be critical.

EDIT: It's not going to fail EMC under EU regulation that easily, as the casing is going to filter about all issues. Compatibility with other parts inside the same system is still at peril though.