Next-Gen NVIDIA Graphics Cards “Ampere” based on 7nm Node Coming in Q1-2020

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    Jensen Huang announcing the NVIDIA RTX (Turing) cards with ray tracing support
    Jensen Huang announcing the NVIDIA RTX (Turing) cards with ray tracing support

    NVIDIA rolled out its RTX Turing cards last year with a lot of fanfare, promising ray-tracing to the masses at “affordable” prices. Although there have been less than a handful of RT titles as of now, it appears that the technology is finally going to take off in the coming months with most major AAA games as well as the next-gen consoles planning to support it. It would be an overstatement to say that the GeForce 20 series cards handle ray-tracing without breaking a sweat.

    The RTX 2060 barely manages to run RTX with DLSS on, at the lowest preset at 1080p while the RTX 2080 Super is brought down to its knees at 4K even without ray-tracing. Even the mighty RTX 2080 Ti can’t sustain 60 FPS in Metro Exodus with all the settings cranked to ultra. Before the more anticipated titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Watch Dogs Legion and Bloodlines 2 arrive next year, NVIDIA will be planning to launch its next-gen lineup, featuring amped-up ray-tracing abilities.

    I mean what better way than that to entice people than promise CD Projekt Red’s upcoming blockbuster at 4K in all its ray-tracing glory? Might seem cruel but to most, it’s just business. The same thing happened when The Witcher 3 came out. The GTX 780 Ti barely managed to run it at ultra without running into some sort of bottleneck. Then came the Maxwell-based 900 series. I remember I had a pair of 980 Tis that barely managed 60 FPS at 4K using the high preset. Rough times.

    There are two sources that are pointing towards the imminent launch of the next-gen Ampere graphics cards early next year. Digitimes, one of the most prominent industry observers confirmed a while back that NVIDIA will be launching the RTX 30 series in 2020 based on Samsung’s 7nm node. Then there’s Igor from Igor’s Lab Germany who is also claiming that NVIDIA will be launching its Ampere cards in the first quarter of 2020.

    Lastly, there’s that ECC certification that WCCFTech spotted which mentions a couple of potential Ampere GPUs. This is all the more possible when you consider that NVIDIA usually launches its newer architectures ahead of AMD, and knowing that Navi 20 (Big Navi) is scheduled for launch by mid-2020, it’s likely that team green will push the pedal and go ahead with an early 2020 release.

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