Possibly unsure of the GeForce RTX 3070 tackling AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series parts, NVIDIA is designing a new RTX 30-series SKU positioned between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. This is not a 16 GB variant of the RTX 3070, but rather a new SKU based on the 8 nm "GA102" silicon, according to a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks, kopite7kimi. The SKU is based on the GA102 with the ASIC code "GA102-150-KD-A1." The silicon is configured with 7,424 CUDA cores across 58 streaming multiprocessors (29 TPCs), 232 tensor cores, 232 TMUs, 58 RT cores, and an unknown number of ROPs. According to kopite7kimi, the card is configured with a 320-bit wide memory interface, although it's not known if this is conventional GDDR6, like the RTX 3070 has, or faster GDDR6X, like that on the RTX 3080.

NVIDIA recently "cancelled" a future 16 GB variant of the RTX 3070, and 20 GB variant of the RTX 3080, which is possibly the company calibrating its response to the Radeon RX 6000 series. We theorize that doubling in memory amounts may not have hit the desired cost-performance targets; and the company probably believes the competitive outlook of the RTX 3080 10 GB is secure. This explains the need for a SKU with performance halfway between that of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080. As for pricing, with the RTX 3070 positioned at $500 and the RTX 3080 at $700, the new SKU could be priced somewhere in between. AMD's RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are expected to feature DirectX 12 Ultimate logo compliance, meaning that there is a level playing ground between AMD and NVIDIA in the performance segment.

Ashes of the Singularity (AotS) Benchmark numbers for the upcoming GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card surfaced, strengthening NVIDIA's performance claims for the card being "faster" than the previous generation flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. According to the benchmark numbers dug out by _rogame and compiled by VideoCardz, the RTX 3070 ends up being 1% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti at 1080p with the "Crazy" preset. This lead extends to 2.3% at 1440p, albeit with a custom preset of which details aren't known.

At 4K UHD with the "Crazy" preset, however, the RTX 3070 ends up about 2.4% slower than the RTX 2080 Ti. These numbers suggest that the RTX 3070 should still be a formidable 4K UHD gaming option, with moderate RTX effects. It should allow you to game at 1440p with RTX maxed out; and should enable 1080p high refresh-rate AAA gaming; but for those seeking 4K UHD with RTX maxed out, the RTX 3080 should be the one to buy. Then again, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series is just around the corner, and could take a swing at this segment, with a full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, and plenty of muscle.

Acer has expanded its award-winning monitor line with a new assortment of powerful monitors suited to a wide range of gamers, from elite professionals requiring top-of-the-line technology to casual players more concerned with enjoying themselves. Additionally, Acer is the first[2] brand to offer TÜV Rheinland Eyesafe -certified gaming monitors, designed to selectively filter out blue light while still maintaining crisp and vivid colors.

"Our newest gaming monitors feature the industry's newest technology to give gamers smooth performance and comfortable ergonomics," said Victor Chien, President, Digital Display Business, Acer Inc. "Designed to appeal to the most power-hungry gamers as well as those who just want to have fun, the new Predator and Nitro-branded monitors are available in a variety of designs and sizes to support just about anyone in the market for a gaming monitor."

Fresh reports floating in the rumor mill's circulatory system claim that NVIDIA backtracked on its plans to launch higher VRAM capacity versions of their RTX 3080 and the (in the meantime, delayed) RTX 3070. These cards launched with 10 GB VRAM for the RTX 3080 and 8 GB VRAM for the RTX 3070, with reports circulating as early as their announcement that there would be double-capacity versions hitting the market just a few months later - specifically, in December of this year. Videocardz, however, claims that these long-rumored 20 GB and 16 GB SKUs have now been canceled by NVIDIA, who sent this news to its AIB partners - and the usage of canceled, not postponed, is perfunctory.

For cards theoretically shipping come December, this is indeed a small advance notice, but it might be enough for AIB partners to feed all their GA102-200 (RTX 3080) and GA104-400 (RTX 3070) silicon towards the already - if not readily - available models. This report, Videocardz claims, has been confirmed by two of their sources, and comes at the exact same day specifications for AMD's RX 6000 series leaked. It's likely NVIDIA already had knowledge of its competition's designs and performance targets, however, so this could be seen as nothing more than a coincidence. One of the publications' sources claims GDDR6X yields might be the cause for the cancellation, but this doesn't help explain why the alleged RTX 3070 16 GB card (with its GDDR6 chips) was also canceled. Remember: these are rumors on cards that were never announced by NVIDIA themselves, so take these with the appropriate salt-mine level of skepticism.

AMD in a letter to its retail partners issued guidelines to prevent scalping of the kind that affected the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" launch. The letter, leaked to the web by RedGamingTech, calls for measures such as real-time bot detection, complex CAPTCHA implementations (such as math, pictures, etc), a queue-based reservation system; manual processing of online orders, minimizing B2B re-selling to ensure sales to private individuals (end-users), and dynamic inventory. The Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" series desktop processors will start being available from November 5, while AMD will detail Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 availability in its October 28 public presentation dedicated to the graphics card series.

ASUS unveiled a special variant of its 2020 VivoBook Flip 14 convertible notebook, which features the "First Intel Discrete Graphics," expected to be the Iris Xe DG1 discrete GPU based on the Xe LP architecture. Intel appears to be promoting the combination of the Iris Xe dGPU with its 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" mobile processors, as a potent ultra portable computing solution with rich graphics and mobile gaming. This eats into the markets of entry-level dGPUs by NVIDIA and AMD. Intel is also developing an iGPU+dGPU Multi-Adapter technology that could leverage asymmetric explicit multi-GPU to accelerate gaming performance. The VivoBook Flip 14 TP470EZ features a 14-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) display, and so the combination of the "Tiger Lake" Xe LP iGPU and dGPU could take a swing at Full HD AAA and e-sports gaming.

NVIDIA has today updated its video encode and decode matrix with references to the latest Ampere GPU family. The video encode/decode matrix represents a table of supported video encoding and decoding standards on different NVIDIA GPUs. The matrix has a reference dating back to the Maxwell generation of NVIDIA graphics cards, showing what video codecs are supported by each generation. That is a useful tool for reference purposes, as customers can check if their existing or upcoming GPUs support a specific codec standard if they need any for video reproduction purposes. The update to the matrix comes in a form of Ampere GPUs, which are now present there.

For example, the table shows that, while supporting all of the previous generations of encoding standards, the Ampere based GPUs feature support for HEVC B Frame standard. For decoding purposes, the Ampere lineup now includes support for AV1 8-bit and 10-bit formats, while also supporting all of the previous generation formats. For a more detailed look at the table please go to NVIDIA's website here.

NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA—one of the world's most important supercomputing centers—will use the company's accelerated computing platform to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer.

The new "Leonardo" system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation.

A report straight from DigiTimes claims that NVIDIA is looking to upgrade their Ampere consumer GPUs from Samsung's 8 nm to TSMC's 7 nm. According to the source, the volume of this transition should be "very large", but most likely wouldn't reflect the entirety of Ampere's consumer-facing product stack. The report claims that TSMC has become more "friendly" to NVIDIA. This could be because TSMC now has available manufacturing capacity in 7 nm due to some of its clients moving to the company's 5 nm node, or simply because TSMC hadn't believed NVIDIA to consider Samsung as a viable foundry alternative - which it now does - and has thus lowered pricing.

There are various reasons being leveraged at this, none with substantial grounds other than "reported from industry sources". NVIDIA looking for better yields is one of the appointed reasons, as is its history as a TSMC customer. NVIDIA shouldn't have too high a cost porting its manufacturing to TSMC in terms of design changes to the silicon level so as to cater to different characteristics of TSMC's 7 nm, because the company's GA100 GPU (Ampere for the non-consumer market) is already manufactured at TSMC. The next part of this post is mere (relatively informed) speculation, so take that with a saltier disposition than what came before.

Ubisoft has today updated the PC system requirements for its Watch Dogs: Legion game. Set to release on October 29th this year, we are just a few weeks away from its release. With the arrival of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere graphics cards, Ubisoft has decided to update the official PC system requirements with RTX-on capabilities. The inclusion of raytracing in the game requires a faster CPU, as well as an RTX-capable GPU. At 1080p resolution, you need at least an RTX 2060 GPU to play with high settings, and raytracing turned to the medium, including DLSS. Going up to 1440p, Ubisoft recommends gamers to use at least an RTX 3070 GPU for very high preset, raytracing on high, and DLSS set to quality. If you want to max everything out and play with the highest settings at 4K resolution, you will need an RTX 3080 GPU.

Bitspower today released its Classic series full-coverage water blocks for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards (model numbers: BP-VG3090FE and BP-VG3080FE). The two cards take advantage of the short PCB length of NVIDIA's Founders Edition PCBs, and position their coolant terminals at the tail ends, rather than at the top.

The blocks use nickel-plated copper as primary material, with mirror finish at the GPU and memory contact areas. The top is clear acrylic, and studded with addressable RGB LEDs. A back-plate is included with the block. The main coolant channel passes through nearly all hot-zones on the obverse side of the PCB, including the GPU, the up to 24 memory pads, and DrMOS. Even the RTX 3080 variant includes a back-plate, possibly in anticipation of the 20 GB variant that has memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB. The BP-VG3080FE is priced at USD $158, while the BP-VG3090FE goes for $202.

The supply of NVIDIA's newly announced GeForce RTX Ampere lineup has been quite controversial since the beginning. Demand for the new GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs has been rather high and NVIDIA experienced big "demand issues" as the CEO Jensen Huang says. The company didn't expect such high demand and thus hasn't stocked up the chips for that many orders. NVIDIA's AIBs have also seen this problem with GPU demand, as it is too high in ratio to supply. As more chips are manufactured, we can expect this problem only to settle down over time. Today, we got an interesting piece of information regarding the availability of Founders Edition (FE) GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. NVIDIA has posted on the forums stating the following:

Suroosh@NVIDIA

---

We have heard your feedback regarding the NVIDIA online store and are working to improve the experience.

In the meantime, we will be selling our GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Edition through other partners. In the US, you can shop for Founders Edition at Best Buy - GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090. In Europe, we continue to review Founders Edition fulfillment options.

Founders Edition units are limited, and more will be available in the coming weeks alongside an increasing supply of boards from our global board partners.

---

AMD's RDNA2 graphics architecture features hardware-accelerated decoding of the AV1 video format, according to a Microsoft blog announcing the format's integration with Windows 10. The blog mentions the three latest graphics architectures among those that support accelerated decoding of the format—Intel Gen12 Iris Xe, NVIDIA RTX 30-series "Ampere," and AMD RX 6000-series "RDNA2." The AV1 format is being actively promoted by major hardware vendors to online streaming content providers, as it offers 50% better compression than the prevalent H.264 (translating into that much bandwidth savings), and 20% better compression than VP9. You don't need these GPUs to use AV1, anyone can use it with Windows 10 (version 1909 or later), by installing the AV1 Video Extension from the Microsoft Store. The codec will use software (CPU) decode in the absence of hardware acceleration.

AMD in its October 8 online launch event for the Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, provided a teaser of the company's next flagship graphics card slotted in the Radeon RX 6000 series. This particular SKU has been referred to by company CEO Lisa Su as "Big Navi," meaning it could be the top part from AMD's upcoming client GPU lineup. As part of the teaser, Su held up the reference design card, and provided three performance numbers of the card as tested on a machine powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X "Zen 3" processor. We compared these performance numbers, obtained at 4K UHD, with our own testing data for the games, to see how the card compares to other current-gen cards in its class. Our testing data for one of the games is from the latest RTX 30-series reviews, find details of our test bed here. We obviously have a different CPU since the 5900X is unreleased, but use the highest presets in our testing.

With "Borderlands 3" at 4K, with "badass" performance preset and DirectX 12 renderer, AMD claims a frame-rate of 61 FPS. We tested the game with its DirectX 12 renderer in our dedicated performance review (test bed details here). AMD's claimed performance ends up 45.9 percent higher than that of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti as tested by us, which yields 41.8 FPS on our test bed. The RTX 3080 ends up 15.24 percent faster than Big Navi, with 70.3 FPS. It's important to note here that AMD may be using a different/lighter test scene than us, since we don't use internal benchmark tools of games, and design our own test scenes. It's also important to note that we tested Borderlands 3 with DirectX 12 only in the game's launch-day review, and use the DirectX 11 renderer in our regular VGA reviews.

AMD is planning to enter the FPGA market by buying out one of Intel's largest competitors, Xilinx. The Wall Street Journal reports that AMD is in "advanced talks" to acquire the San Jose-based firm which specializes in FPGAs of all shapes and sizes, including large, high logic cell-count FPGAs under the Virtex UltraScale brand, the main competitor to Intel's Stratix 10. Xilinx is valued at $26 billion, although analysts estimate the AMD acquisition to go down at close to $30 billion, making it one of the largest tech acquisitions of the year, after NVIDIA's buyout of Arm from Softbank. An FPGA lineup would give AMD a near complete portfolio of computing hardware IP: CPUs with x86 and Arm licenses, GPUs, GPU-based scalar compute processors, semi-custom SoCs, low-power media processors, and now FPGA.

Alienware has always prided itself on creating high-performance PCs that power the most immersive gaming experiences on the planet. Never afraid to push the envelope is what has allowed Alienware to stand out in the gaming industry for decades. This desire to drive innovation and performance continues to be reflected in our newest Alienware devices. We're not only bringing the latest & greatest technologies to market, but we're doing it in a way that pushes the design to the limit, giving our customers the ultimate battle station. With the newly announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs and 360Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC - combined with our engineering ingenuity - Alienware's gaming products take another giant leap forward in performance and provide stunning visuals.

Delivering the same high-level experience at home as it does in the world's most demanding e-sports arenas, the Alienware Aurora R11 is for gamers and creators everywhere. Available with custom-engineered NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs and up to 10th Gen Intel Core i9 10900KF processors, the new Aurora builds on its future-ready promise through a tool-less upgradable chassis.

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the highest level of AORUS GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards powered by NVIDIA Ampere architecture. GIGABYTE launched 4 AORUS graphics cards - AORUS GeForce RTX 3090 XTREME 24G, AORUS GeForce RTX 3090 MASTER 24G, AORUS GeForce RTX 3080 XTREME 10G, and AORUS GeForce RTX 3080 MASTER 10G. The 4 graphics cards are all equipped with top-of-the-line overclocked GPU that certified by GIGABYTE GPU Gauntlet sorting technology.

Based on the previous generation of AORUS graphics card, GIGABYTE has released a new generation of more advanced MAX-Covered Cooling technology to meet the high-wattage cooling requirements of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 GPUs. There is an embedded powerful LCD monitor on the side of the graphics card, which can display the status of the graphics card, customized GIFs, text and picture. With RGB Fusion 2.0, the lighting effects of the entire AORUS graphics card can be adjusted according to your preferences.

NVIDIA could update the higher end of its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" product stack with two new additions in December 2020. Sources tell VideoCardz that the company is preparing to launch a 20 GB variant of the GeForce RTX 3080, and a 16 GB variant of the RTX 3070. The RTX 3080 20 GB will come with double the memory of the RTX 3080 the company debuted last month, over the same 320-bit wide GDDR6X memory interface, possibly by using two 8 Gbit memory chips per 32-bit path (which is how the RTX 3090 achieves 24 GB, over its 384-bit memory bus). The RTX 3070 16 GB will likely use a similar approach, albeit with GDDR6 memory. Meanwhile, the mid-range "RTX 3060 Ti" could debut in November, following the late-October introduction of the RTX 3070 8 GB. Much of NVIDIA's product stack adjustments could be in preparation for AMD's late-October reveal of the Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 series.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of its GeForce software. Version 456.71 WHQL comes game-ready for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War PC Beta, which includes not just optimization for the game, but also support for NVIDIA Reflex, a technology that works to reduce whole system latency. In addition, the drivers correct a handful of issues, including hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling resulting in lower performance for Divinity: Original Sin 2 Definitive Edition, a bug with G-SYNC enabled games triggering a black-screen in fullscreen mode, on certain Adaptive Sync displays; and Fortnite crashing on certain notebooks with RTX reflections and shadows enabled. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 456.71 WHQL

Shortages in supply of GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards could persist until 2021, according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, responding to a question in a Q&A session of the GTC 2020 (Fall) conference. "The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue," said Huang. "The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected—and we expected really a lot," he added.

Jen-Hsun predicts that the Holiday 2020 shopping season will only compound availability woes. "I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year. Remember, we're also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the "Ampere factor," and then you add on top of that the "Ampere holiday factor," and we're going to have a really really big Q4 season." He likened the demand of the RTX 3080 to that of the Intel Pentium in the mid-1990s. "Retailers will tell you they haven't seen a phenomenon like this in over a decade of computing. It hearkens back to the old days of Windows 95 and Pentium when people were just out of their minds to buy this stuff. So this is a phenomenon like we've not seen in a long time, and we just weren't prepared for it."

Announced today, the NVIDIA CloudXR platform will be available on Amazon EC2 P3 and G4 instances, which support NVIDIA V100 and T4 GPUs, allowing cloud users to stream high-quality immersive experiences to remote VR and AR devices. The CloudXR platform includes the NVIDIA CloudXR software development kit, NVIDIA Virtual Workstation software and NVIDIA AI SDKs to deliver photorealistic graphics, with the mobile convenience of all-in-one XR headsets. XR is a collective term for VR, AR and mixed reality.

With the ability to stream from the cloud, professionals can now easily set up, scale and access immersive experiences from anywhere — they no longer need to be tethered to expensive workstations or external VR tracking systems. The growing availability of advanced tools like CloudXR is paving the way for enhanced collaboration, streamlined workflows and high fidelity virtual environments. XR solutions are also introducing new possibilities for adding AI features and functionality.

NVIDIA today announced a new kind of processor—DPUs, or data processing units—supported by DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture that enables breakthrough networking, storage and security performance.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's three-year DPU roadmap in today's GPU Technology Conference keynote. It features the new NVIDIA BlueField -2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit for building applications on DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

When NVIDIA introduced its Ampere consumer graphics cards, they launched three models - the GeForce RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 GPUs. Both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 have seen the light of the day as they are now available for purchase, however, one card has remained. The GeForce RTX 3070 launch was originally planned for October 15th launch, but it has officially been postponed by NVIDIA. According to the company, the reason behind this sort of delay in the launch is the high demand expected. Production of the cards is ramping up quickly and the company is quickly stocking up the cards. Likely, NVIDIA AIBs are taking their time to stock up on cards, as the mid-range is usually in very high demand.

As a reminder, the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card features 5888 CUDA cores running at a base frequency of 1.5 GHz and boost frequency of 1.73 GHz. Unlike the higher-end Ampere cards, the RTX 3070 uses older GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus with a bandwidth of 448 GB/s. The GPU features a TDP of 220 W and will be offered in a range of variants by AIBs. You will be able to purchase the GPU on October 29th for the price of $499.

NVIDIA still hasn't released their desktop RTX 3070 graphics cards (those are set for October 15th), and availability for the already-launched RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 is spotty at best. However, the company is obviously gearing up for release of mobile versions of their RTX 30-series; NVIDIA's graphics solutions are manufacturers' usual top picks, after all. The RTX 3070 Mobile (Max Q) has thus been pictured already in its Qualification Sample state, and there are some details that can be gleaned already.

Markings on the chip place this as GN20-E5-A1, which allegedly refers to the GA104 GPU which is expected to power the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards. GDDR6 memory is confirmed (naturally), since markings on the memory chips, which are placed quite close towards the actual NVIDIA silicon, are Sk Hynix identified as H56C8H24AIR - the same employed on AMD's Radeon Pro 550M. The full GA104 GPU features 6,144 CUDA cores however, the desktop version has been confirmed as being shipped with 5,888 cores enabled out of those. It could be that NVIDIA plans to release the mobile version with the same cores (and likely at a reduced frequency for improved power efficiency), which would obviously equate to lower performance; or maybe NVIDIA will employ the full GA104 silicon with even more reduced frequencies for the same performance - with substantial power savings as the proverbial cherry on top. These last ideas are pure speculation, though; we'll have to wait a little while to confirm specs.