Ever since our first inkling of Nvidia’s next-gen Lovelace GPUs, folks have assumed that it was a refresh of the current Nvidia Ampere architecture. Was that underselling what Nvidia has in store, however?
Noted Twitter leaker kopite7kimi is now saying that the original GPU planned for Lovelace, which they estimated would a little better than double the performance of the Ampere GPU it was replacing, is no longer the GPU Nvidia is working on. Indeed, the new AD102 GPU is more than just a refresh of the existing Ampere architecture.
This would mean that the next-gen AD102 GPU, which will likely power the Nvidia RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards, is more like a whole new architecture rather than a refinement of what previously existed. PC Gamer notes that this could very well be in response to the rumored performance of AMD RDNA 3, the next-gen GPU architecture expected in AMD’s Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs.
The new tweet clarifies what kopite7kimi said about a year ago, which was that while the Lovelace AD102 GPU would see a performance increase of about 2.2X, the RDNA 3 Navi31 GPU would see a 2.5X increase over the Navi21 GPU found in the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.
If Nvidia got wind of what AMD was cooking up, that could have put a lot of pressure on the engineering team to seriously boost performance rather than provide a more modest improvement over the GA102 GPU found in the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, and it puts other recent reports about a 900W RTX 4090 graphics card from Nvidia in a new context.