As the hype builds for the highly-anticipated next-generation of graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, fans have had to make do with leaks and rumors from a variety of sources, some of whom are more reliable than others. Today though, gamers finally have an actual benchmark to look at courtesy of Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY. His post shows a set of benchmarks run on a real Nvidia Ampere based card, which appear to show comparable results to those suggested in recent leaks.

The tests were run using a professional Nvidia Ampere A100 compute GPU, which is the first Ampere GPU on the market, and cut down versions of which will power the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. The benchmarks were run in OctaneBench, which unfortunately does not work with AMD cards yet. They show that the A100 is around 43% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card, which reportedly means the RTX 3080 Ti is roughly 30% faster than the current generation card, if the rumored specifications are correct.

If accurate, this means that the RTX 3080 will end up around 15-20% faster than the current RTX 2080 Ti, which is roughly the same speed increased stated in a recent Nvidia leak. However, these benchmarks were all carried out with ray tracing switched off. Given that one long-standing rumor suggests the new Ampere GPUs will have four times the ray tracing performance of the current Turing based cards, the real-world gaming performance in titles with ray tracing enabled could prove much higher.

As might be expected from the first in a new-generation of GPUs, the benchmark showed the A100 to be the fastest GPU ever tested on OctaneBench, but the results need to be taken with caution, as the final specifications of the consumer GeForce RTX 30 series cards have not been released. In addition, there is still no official information on how the Ampere GPUs fare against AMDs upcoming Navi GPUs. If the latter is delayed, as has been rumored, it may be several months before gamers get to see some real head-to-head benchmarks.

While these benchmarks may not give gamers as much information as they would like, they are a relatively positive indication of the baseline performance that the next-generation of graphics cards will bring. With ray tracing a key feature of both Nvidia and AMDs new hardware, including AMDs Navi based PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X graphics chips, the biggest benefit of the new cards may be as yet unseen, with more and more games likely to utilize the increased ray tracing performance over time.

Of course, a 15-30% improvement in baseline performance would still be very useful for gamers reaching for the highest possible frame rates and detail levels. Particularly if the strong competition between Nvidia and AMD pushes them to release their new cards at comparatively low prices.

Nvidia RTX 3080 is rumored to release on 17th September 2020.

Source: NotebookCheck