PC gamers envious of the power that AMD is bringing to console gaming with the upcoming launches of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5 need not worry too much. AMD rival Nvidia is rumored to be working on its next-generation GPU, which uses the Ampere architecture and is rumored to launch as the RTX 3000 series. It could very well give the AMD-powered consoles some major competition in graphics performance. More specifically, the RTX 3000 cards could finally make 4K ray tracing games a playable reality, according to Tom’s Guide, which cited a report from YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead.
Nvidia’s upcoming — and unannounced — RTX 3080 flagship will come with some major upgrades, according to the channel, which will allow the cards to have performance in the range of 21 teraflops, or 9 teraflops more than the Xbox Series X. To power this much horsepower, Team Green will be giving its flagship GPU — the GA102 — 18Gbps of GDDR6 video memory, according to Moore’s Law is Dead‘s sources.
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The channel also said the new card will be similar in appearance to the 20-series Founders Edition cards. To keep things cool, Nvidia will be using three fans — instead of two on the RTX 2080 Founders Edition — with a cleaner, simplified design using less screws. Another potential benefit of this design is that maintenance on the card could be more easily accomplished for DIYers.
To connect to your favorite displays, the rear of the cards is said to feature three DisplayPort 2.0 ports, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB-C port. The card will be PCIe 4.0-compliant, making Nvidia more competitive with AMD’s RDNA 2 cards.
Leaked specs suggest that Team Green’s updated cards will come with 5,376 CUDA cores, with early engineering samples consuming 220 to 230 watts providing boost speeds above 2.2GHz. On paper, the card will have 40% more memory bandwidth than the current RTX 2080 Ti, according to the YouTube channel.
The new 3000 series cards will get a huge performance boost over the RTX 2080 Ti, with performance said to be 50% better in most titles and up to 70% better in a few titles that were not specified.
If these specifications and early results are accurate, then 4K PC gaming will soon become a reality with Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, and the RTX 3000 series could not only be a serious challenger to the next generation of gaming consoles, but outperform the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.