Nvidia in 2021: Ampere’s dominance continues!

Will Nvidia win in 2021?

2020 has been an absolutely amazing year for Nvidia, which has finally released the Ampere graphics architecture for both data centers and PC games. The novelty is a significant improvement over the offering of older graphics cards such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, hinting at 8K performance with RTX 3090 graphics cards.

Overall, Nvidia is just getting started with Ampere, especially considering that we haven’t yet received mobile graphics cards or budget graphics cards on the same architecture. And it’s impossible to forget about the upcoming ARM deal. If it succeeds, Nvidia will become one of the most important tech companies on the market.

As a result, while Nvidia finished 2020 with a long list of successes, 2021 promises to be even cooler with ray tracing.

(Image credit: TechRadar)

| RTX FOR EVERYONE?

Today, if you want a graphics card that supports the cutting-edge technologies heavily advertised by Nvidia, namely ray tracing, DLSS, and Nvidia Broadcast, you need an RTX-branded graphics card. The only problem is that Nvidia makes these cards from the mid-range, so you will have to pay at least $ 349 (26,000r + VAT) for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060.

And since this graphics card seems to be out of production, it makes more sense to shell out $ 399 (£ 30,000 + VAT) for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

Thanks to Nvidia Turing, the company switched to graphics cards starting at $ 349 while you need ray tracing, as graphics cards like the GTX 1660 and GTX 1650 Super have not received RT cores and tensor cores, focusing on pure rasterization performance.

It can be argued that the main reason comes down to the implementation of the absolute minimum in Nvidia RTX 2060, as for the capacities of advanced technologies, therefore, the question arises: will we get the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 for $ 199 or less in 2021?

In terms of performance, we see no problems or limitations. Just look at the RTX 3060 Ti, which is 38-40% faster than the RTX 2060 Super. We see no problem creating a budget option that can offer all the RT core features that we’ve come to love over the past few years.

Nvidia could have kept RTX as something more premium, and while we see this as the most likely route, we wish it weren’t. Trust me, having a graphics card that can run Nvidia Broadcast is a godsend for a remote worker, and opening up the technology to students and people on a budget can be extremely rewarding. We hope Nvidia gets it right in 2021 by releasing low-cost RTX graphics cards.

(Image credit: Future)

| CONSOLES? WHERE ARE THE COOL LAPTOPS?

Right now, even the best gaming laptops continue to use Nvidia RTX 20-series graphics cards, but we don’t think the situation will last long.

Looking back at Turing as an example, the 20-series desktop graphics cards were released in September 2018, the laptop graphics cards had to wait until January 29, 2019, after they were unveiled at CES a few weeks earlier.

This time around, the Ampere lineup is topped by the 2020 Nvidia RTX 3080, so if Nvidia follows the same schedule, it’s likely we’ll see laptops with mobile graphics at CES this year. We are already getting the first leaks with laptop promises on the RTX 3000 graphics.

However, it is important to keep in mind the thermal and energy constraints of the laptop design. For example, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 has a 350W total graphics power (TGP) rating for desktop PCs. The RTX 2080 Super on laptops, on the other hand, was limited to 200W in full performance, and only 90W in the Max-Q model, which is much more common.

So while we should get more powerful mobile graphics soon enough, don’t expect laptops to easily be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 with 4K tracing anytime soon.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

| WHEN CAN WE BUY VIDEOCARDS?

If you’ve been looking for graphics cards lately, you’ve likely noticed that RTX 3000 isn’t available just about everywhere. And it’s not just the new Nvidia graphics cards – AMD Big Navi cards are nowhere to be found either.

The situation is likely not to change in the first months of 2021, but relief should come soon. We’ve already heard the news of a billion-dollar manufacturing deal between Nvidia and Samsung. Samsung released a significant number of the first Ampere graphics cards, so it would be wise for the Green Team to rely on Samsung to continue to meet the demand for its graphics cards.

However, it will still be a few months before a consumer can easily purchase an Nvidia 30-series graphics card without the fierce F5 spam, so they can grab it before the bot does.

In most ways, the crisis is very similar to how miners bought all video cards in 2017. Fortunately, most miners these days use special ASIC graphics cards, so we have a question of supply and demand. We’re looking forward to increasing the availability of the RTX 3080 in the first half of 2021 so that even more people can get their hands on these fantastic graphics cards.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

| DON’T FORGET ABOUT ARM

Back in September 2020, Nvidia struck a deal to buy ARM for $ 40 billion, although that deal still didn’t materialize. The last thing we heard was that the FTC may launch an anti-competitive investigation into this extremely large deal.

We are not waiting for an immediate decision, we will have to wait to see how it all ends. But if that happens, Nvidia will become one of the largest tech companies in the world.

While Nvidia is best known for its gaming products, the company is actually much larger, and it is involved in everything from extravagant computing to the development of artificial intelligence, data science and self-driving cars. The inclusion of ARM will expand the company’s reach even further, and with Microsoft and Apple starting to see Intel and AMD processors dumping from Microsoft and Apple, Nvidia could see some very massive changes in 2021.