There are rumors that Nvidia will be doing a full stack of ray tracing GPUs with Ampere. Where Turing has the ray tracing RTX 20-series and the non-ray tracing GTX 16-series, Ampere could unify the features similar to the GTX 10-series. If that rumor proves correct, we anticipate yet another step up in budget and mid-range graphics card pricing, with the least expensive cards costing at least $200. Anything below that will be left for previous generation hardware and integrated graphics.

The table also leaves some clear price gaps that might be filled with intermediate hardware, for example RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3050 Ti. In the past, Nvidia has delayed the launch of lower tier GPUs by 6-12 months, so the 3050 at least is probably a year out. The lower tier GPUs are also likely to be manufactured on Samsung's 8nm or 7nm tech, as TSMC's 7nm capacity is largely tapped out right now. That shouldn't matter too much, but we'll need to wait for further details.

There's certainly a lot of fuzziness in the above potential specs, so don't take anything as gospel truth just yet. GA100 is a known quantity; everything else is up in the air right now. We anticipate an official announcement of at least a few Ampere GPUs for consumers by July or August, based on how Nvidia rolled out Pascal back in 2016.

Nvidia Ampere Graphics Card Models


We've been referring to the upcoming Ampere GPUs as RTX 3080 Ti, 3080, 3070 and 3060 so far, and all indications are that Nvidia will stick with a familiar pattern for the coming GPUs. We wrote last year about Nvidia filing for trademarks on 3080, 4080 and 5080 in the European Union to block a rumored RX 3080 brand from AMD's Navi GPUs. AMD didn't end up using RX 3080 (whether it ever intended to try that or not isn't clear), but we expect Nvidia will.

What about suffixes like 'Super' or 'Ti,' though — will we see RTX 3080 Super, or 3070 Ti? We're going to give that a big, fat 'maybe' (probably), though launch windows will vary across the range of Ampere GPUs. Nvidia's current branding seems to be working fine, so hopefully it doesn't choose to fix what isn't broken. RTX 3080 Ti should end up as the halo product for Ampere consumer cards, probably with some form of Titan for those with bottomless wallets.

Nvidia Ampere and RTX 3080 Release Date

Perhaps the biggest question — and another question with a lot of uncertainty — is when the RTX 3080 and other Ampere GPUs will launch. 2020 seemed a given a few months ago, and we fully expected to hear at least something at GTC 2020 in March. The Nvidia A100 reveal during Jensen's keynote suggests the rest of the lineup will be announced sooner rather than later. COVID-19 delays are certainly happening, but we expect GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards to arrive this fall, rather than slipping into 2021.

Historically Nvidia usually does a staggered launch. The fastest GPU comes out first, then the step down, then another step down. It has varied over the years, of course. GTX 1080/1070 launched first, with the GTX 1080 Ti arriving almost a year later. RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 on the other hand launched within a week of each other, followed by the 2070 the next month and 2060 three months after that.

Ampere looks like it will be similar to the Pascal launch, as the GP100 announcement preceded the GTX 10-series details, but actual Pascal graphics cards were more easily found than data center hardware. However, we also expect the consumer parts will follow the Turing pattern, meaning RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 will come out basically at the same time, with RTX 3070 coming a month or so later. RTX 3060 meanwhile will probably show up in January 2021 at the earliest.


One arm, one leg — next! But seriously, in the estimated specs table, we listed our own guesses as to pricing. We're probably being overly optimistic, as Nvidia could go a very different route. There's been a steady increase in generational pricing since the GTX 900-series launched.

The GTX 970 was a $329 part, GTX 1070 was $379-$449, and RTX 2070 jumped to $499-$599 at launch. The RTX 2070 Super walked that back a bit to $499, which is still $120 more than the previous generation. Or we could look at the Ti cards: $649 for the 980 Ti, $699 for the 1080 Ti, and $1,199 for the 2080 Ti. The 2080 Ti was supposed to have third party cards starting at $999, but even now, more than 18 months later, such cards are almost impossible to find in stock.

The good news is that the market has changed quite a bit since the RTX 20-series debut. There was basically no competition from AMD at the top of the GPU hierarchy for the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti — even now, the GTX 1080 Ti tends to match or exceed AMD's highest performance part. But when the RTX 3080 and Ampere launch, there's a good chance AMD will also have Big Navi / RDNA 2 / Navi 2x parts available or coming soon. That could mean competitive performance as well as a similar feature set.

Nvidia is known for its aggressive business tactics. Part of the low price on GTX 970 was undoubtedly thanks to AMD having competitive R9 290/290X parts slated to arrive just a month or so later. It doesn't really matter whether Big Navi launches just before or just after Ampere; either way, Nvidia is going to want to maintain its lead in outright performance, while remaining competitive in terms of bang for the buck.

All of that leads to our price estimates. It's doubtful Nvidia will walk back pricing to pre-RTX levels, especially with the move to TSMC's more expensive 7nm lithography, but the timing and circumstances surrounding the RTX 3080 and Ampere launch similarly make it unlikely Nvidia will go after substantially higher prices. Well, except on the RTX 3080 Ti and Titan cards, which are probably going to be stupidly expensive if the rumored specs and performance prove correct.

It's also worth noting that Intel's Xe Graphics will be joining the dedicated graphics card market this year, most likely during the summer or early fall. It's unknown how fast Xe Graphics will be, but there could be up to 512 EU variants — which would likely translate to 4096 GPU 'cores.' That's enough to at least raise an eyebrow and might actually challenge AMD and Nvidia in the high-end market. We'll know more in the coming months.

Bottom Line

As with AMD's Big Navi, the best advice right now is to wait and see what actually materializes. There's plenty of speculation — including here — about what RTX 3080 and Ampere will bring to the table, but ultimately we need to get official specs and pricing, and then run our own tests.

We hope and anticipate that Ampere will be a massive jump in GPU performance, with and without ray tracing. If Nvidia doubles down on ray tracing, it's also possible the RTX 3060 could match or exceed the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti in games like Minecraft RTX where the RT cores are pushed to the limit.

Ampere will certainly be faster and more efficient than Nvidia's current Turing GPUs — 7nm alone will ensure that. However, prices and real-world performance are what really matters. The upcoming GPU launches from all three major players are sure to be exciting.