NVIDIA Announces the GeForce RTX 30 Series: Ampere For Gaming, Starting With RTX 3080

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With much anticipation and more than a few leaks, NVIDIA this morning is announcing the next generation of video cards, the GeForce RTX 30 series. Based upon the gaming and graphics variant of NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture and built on an optimized version of Samsung’s 8nm process, NVIDIA is touting the new cards as delivering some of their greatest gains ever in gaming performance. All the while, the latest generation of GeForce will also be coming with some new features to further set the cards apart from and ahead of NVIDIA’s Turing-based RTX 20 series.

Out of the gate, NVIDIA is announcing the first three cards to make up the new RTX 30 series: the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. These cards are all launching within the next month and a half – albeit at slightly separate times – with the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 leading the charge. The two cards, in turn, will serve as the successors to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080/2080S respectively, hitting new highs in graphics performance, albeit while also hitting new highs in prices in the case of the RTX 3090.

The first card out the door will be the GeForce RTX 3080. With NVIDIA touting upwards of 2x the performance of the RTX 2080, this card will go on sale on September 17[sup]th[/sup] for $700. That will be followed up a week later by the even more powerful GeFoce RTX 3090, which hits the shelves September 24[sup]th[/sup] for $1500.

Finally, the RTX 3070, which is being positioned as more of a traditional sweet spot card, will arrive next month at $499.

Ampere for Gaming: GA102

As is traditionally the case for NVIDIA, this morning’s public presentation was not an architectural deep dive. Though the purely virtual presentation was certainly a change of pace for a company who treats every video card launch like a party, NVIDIA stuck to their successful launch playbook. That means a lot of demonstrations, testimonials, and promotional videos, along with some high-level overviews of several of the technologies and engineering design decisions that went into making their latest generation of GPUs. The net result is that we have a decent idea of what’s in store for the RTX 30 series, but we’ll have to wait for NVIDIA to offer some deep dive technical briefings to fill in the blanks and get to the heart of matters in true AnandTech style.

At a high level, Ampere and the GA102 GPU being used in these top-tier cards brings several major hardware advancements to NVIDIA’s lineup. The biggest of which is the ever-shrinking size of transistors, thanks to a customized version of Samsung's 8nm process. We only have limited information about this process – mostly because it hasn't been used too many places – but at a high level it's Samsung's densest traditional, non-EUV process, derived from their earlier 10nm process. All told, NVIDIA has ended up as a bit of a latecomer in moving to smaller processes, but as the company has re-developed an affinity for shipping large GPUs first, they need higher wafer yields (fewer defects) to get chips out the door.n any case, for NVIDIA’s products Samsung's 8nm process is a full generational jump from their previous process, TSMC’s 12nm “FFN”, which itself was an optimized version of TSMC's 16nm process. So NVIDIA’s transistor densities have gone up significantly, leading to a 28B transistor chip in the case of GA102, which is reflected in the sheer number of CUDA cores and other hardware available. Whereas mid-generation architectures like Turing and Maxwell saw most of their gains at an architectural level, Ampere (like Pascal before it) benefits greatly from a proper jump in lithographic processes. The only hitch in all of this is that Dennard Scaling has died and isn’t coming back, so while NVIDIA can pack more transistors than ever into a chip, power consumption is creeping back up, which is reflected in the cards' TDPs.

NVIDIA hasn’t given us specific die sizes for GA102, but based on some photos we’re reasonably confident it’s over 500mm2. Which is notably smaller than the ridiculously-sized 754mm2 TU102, but it’s still a sizable chip, and among the largest chips produced at Samsung.

Moving on, let’s talk about the Ampere architecture itself. First introduced this spring as part of NVIDIA’s A100 accelerator, until now we’ve only seen Ampere from a matching compute-oriented perspective. GA100 lacked several graphics features so that NVIDIA could maximize the amount of die space allocated to compute, so while graphics-focused Ampere GPUs like GA102 are still a member of the Ampere family, there are a significant number of distinctions or differences between the two. Which is to say that NVIDIA was able to keep a lot under wraps about the gaming side of Ampere until now.

From a compute perspective, Ampere looked a fair bit like Volta before it, and the same can be said from a graphics perspective. GA102 doesn’t introduce any exotic new functional blocks like RT cores or tensor cores, but their capabilities and relative sizes have been tweaked. The most notable change here is that, like Ampere GA100, the gaming Ampere parts inherit updated and more powerful tensor cores, which NVIDIA calls their third generation tensor cores. A single Ampere SM can provide double the tensor throughput of a Turing SM – despite having half as many distinct tensor cores – and it looks like NVIDIA has retained that basic setup for GA102. As a result NVIDIA's FP16 tensor core performance has more than doubled over the previous generation, thanks to the combination of these more powerful tensor cores and an overall larger number of SMs.
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