NVIDIA teases 'Ultimate Countdown' for Ampere GeForce RTX 30 series

NVIDIA officially kicks off next-gen GeForce RTX 30 series hype with 'Ultimate Countdown'... GeForce RTX 3090 Ultimate confirmed?!

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NVIDIA has officially kicked off the marketing hype train for its next-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards with a simple teaser on Twitter.

All the tweet says is #UltimateCountdown which has got me personally thinking that NVIDIA could change the nomenclature like I've wanted for the new GeForce RTX graphics cards -- I wanted the GeForce RTX 3090 ULTRA, for the return of ULTRA -- but maybe we're looking at the GeForce RTX 3090 ULTIMATE?

ULTIMATE is an important branding for NVIDIA right now, and I'm sure even more so going forward -- they have their G-SYNC ULTIMATE monitors and TVs, so it makes sense to have the "Ultimate Countdown" being a countdown to something Ultimate-related, right?

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It seems NVIDIA is going to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the GeForce 256 graphics card -- the world's first GPU, and world's first GeForce card -- in a really, really big way.

Or this is the Ultimate Countdown?

NVIDIA, please... please hire Will Arnett for your GeForce RTX 30 series marketing campaign.

More reading:

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  • Traversal coprocessor: We have had more leaks on NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 3000 series than any family of graphics cards before it, with an interesting "traversal coprocessor" on the new GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards. You can read more on that here.
  • NVCache: Ampere is meant to have something called NVCache, which would be NVIDIA's own form of AMD's HBCC (High Bandwidth Cache Controller, more on that here). NVCache would use your system RAM and SSD to super-speed game load times, as well as optimizing VRAM usage. You can read more on NVCache here.
  • Tensor Memory Compression: NVCache is interesting, but Tensor Memory Compression will be on Ampere, and will reportedly use Tensor Cores to both compress and decompress items that are stored in VRAM. This could see a 20-40% reduction in VRAM usage, or more VRAM usage with higher textures in next-gen games and Tensor Memory Compression decreasing that VRAM footprint by 20-40%.
  • How fast is the GeForce RTX 3090? Freaking fast according to rumors, with 60-90% more performance than the current Turing-based flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. We could see this huge performance leap in ray tracing titles, but we'll have to wait a little while longer to see how much graphical power NVIDIA crams into these new cards. You can read more on those rumors here.
  • Power hungry: As for power consumption, GA102 reportedly uses 230W -- while 24GB of GDDR6X (which we should see on the new Ampere-based TITAN RTX) consumes 60W of power. You can read more on that here.
  • Production begins soon: NVIDIA is reportedly in the DVT (or Design Validation Test) range of its new GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards. Mass production reportedly kicks off in August 2020, with a media event, benchmarks, and more in September 2020 as I predicted many months ago. More on that here.
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I've already written about rumors that NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPU architecture would be up to 75% faster than current-gen GPUs such as the Turing architecture, right after rumors that Ampere would offer 50% more performance at half the power of Turing. This is pretty crazy stuff right there.

Not only that, but we've got some rumored specs on the purported GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards, which will both be powered by NVIDIA's new Ampere GPU architecture.

We've already heard that Ampere would offer 50% more performance at half the power of Turing, which sent the hairs on my neck standing up. Better yet, you can read about the leaked specs on the purported Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 right here.

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Even more reading: