For many years AMD was the underdog as Nvidia dominated the GPU market. However, the Covid-19 pandemic completely changed the tide of the battle. The cheaper priced AMD graphics card so a massive increase in demand causing worries at Nvidia. Soon after a disappointing 2000 series launch AMD was parallel to its competitor Nvidia. However, Nvidia’s announcement on 1st September 2020 completely caught every PC enthusiast off guard.
After plenty of leaks and teases over the last couple weeks Nvidia finally revealed their latest 3000 series graphics cards. Although many expected there to be a minor improvement in performance Nvidia hit the ground running by immediately announcing that the Nvidia 3080 will have double the performance of the highest end old generation card at half the price. In fact, all the 3000 series cards (3070,3080,3090) all outperform the older generation by over double the performance. Many gamers, pc enthusiasts and experts were left amazed but all of them had the same question. How did Nvidia manage to do this?
The answer: Ampere. The latest technology employed by Nvidia in their graphics cards. By partnering with Samsung Nvidia was able to have 56 million transistors per mm2. For reference the 1000 series generation had 23 million and the 2000 series had 25 million. That is almost double the number of transistors. Furthermore, the innovators were able to reduce the size of the process from 12nm to just 8nm making the card blazing fast.
What does this performance look like in games? Reportedly the Nvidia 3090 (the highest end card) can run games at 8k resolution at 60 frames per second. Although the performance of the other cards is yet to be released it seems that Nvidia has made giant leaps in their innovation and development since the last generation release.
The 3080 is set to launch on September 17th followed by the 3090 on September 24th. Finally, Nvidia will release the 3070 “sometime in October” just in time for the Christmas holiday season. Although AMD has made huge leaps in their CPU market against Intel it seems that, with this release, will continue to dominate the GPU market.