Don’t wait for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, even with the leaks!

Nvidia Ampere Heads To The Pros.

Today it seems like we get the latest news and leaks about graphics cards every day, but one of the most interesting remains the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 – or lack thereof. While another leak has surfaced that showcases the alleged Nvidia Ampere GPU, the RTX 3080 shouldn’t be counted on.

The last leak dug by the guys from VideoCardz, demonstrates an Nvidia video card for 124 computing units. In comparison, the RTX 2080 Ti, the reigning consumer market champion, has just 68 compute units. That is, the new indicators are almost twice as large, but this is not all that seems suspicious.

The leaked graphics card comes with a whopping 32GB of video memory, far more than any consumer graphics card will need in the next decade, even with the PS5 and Xbox Series X around the corner. Combined with a relatively low clock speed of 1.1GHz – versus the RTX 2080 Ti’s 1.6GHz clock speed – it looks like the new GPU is about to take a hit from data centers.

With rumors swirling around the mysterious Nvidia graphics card that the company is set to show at GTC 2020 – which will now take place exclusively online – the likelihood of this graphics card targeting gamers is close to zero.

In the end, we won’t know what the next GeForce graphics card will look like until Nvidia finally lifts the mystery. Until then, however, in anticipation of that very day, we’re left with Nvidia Turing – or AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards.

| IF NOT NOW, THEN WHEN?

We’ve been limited to Nvidia Turing graphics cards since August 2018, which means we’ll be celebrating our two-year anniversary in a few short months. Since then, AMD has made giant strides in the mid-market with graphics cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT. But Nvidia should hurry up with a new graphics card.

Despite the increased competition from just a year ago, Nvidia is still the only graphics card manufacturer to support ray tracing and DLSS. And that we don’t mention performance yet, where Nvidia GPUs like the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super currently dominate, with little or no competition from Team Red.

This means that until AMD launches “Big Navi” – another hotly anticipated graphics card that is probably far from release – there is no reason for Nvidia to release a new generation of graphics cards.

If we look at the release history, we usually see a new graphics architecture in the professional market before the average consumer gets his or her new product. For example, Nvidia released its Volta architecture in May 2017, and even then rumors suggested it would be a GTX 1180 graphics card (those were the days). However, it took almost a year before Nvidia unveiled the Nvidia Turing and the GeForce RTX 2080.

The point is, the Nvidia Ampere is likely to be an architecture designed from the ground up for professional and creative workloads. Whenever Nvidia is ready to showcase its next GPU architecture to casual users, it is designed from the ground up for gaming. Until this happens, we can only wait and watch.

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