Yes, it’s true*, the Nvidia GTX 2080 Ti has appeared in an online benchmark database in a way that is absolutely guaranteed** not to have been in any way faked. An Ashes of the Singularity benchmark has shown up online which shows the next high-end GeForce GPU nailing the Crazy 1080p benchmark preset. And delivering essentially the same score in DirectX 12 as a GTX 1080 does in the same benchmark using the Vulkan API. If that doesn’t make it completely believable then how about the GPU name showing up with the suffix ‘special supply for GSS’? Now you must be convinced, right? Want to see the best GPUs you can actually buy? Check out our pick of the best graphics cards around. The benchmark was picked up by Tum Apisak, who is all about benchmark leaks, though he does seem to be questioning it. I can’t think why he would be, because there is absolutely nothing about this appearance in the AotS database that could be faked, surely. That level of GPU forgery would require some sophisticated supercomputer on the level of the Nvidia Volta-powered Summit machine. I expect. Okay, now there is a chance that somehow the user, Nagato, has spoofed the GPU ID on his GTX 1080 to instead display the GTX 2080 Ti moniker, but I don’t know how to do that, so it’s probably borderline impossible. Instead I’m just going to assume the benchmark Tum Apisak has found is completely legit and state that this is categoric proof that the next generation of Nvidia graphics cards is going to be using the 20-series designation. There’s been a lot of debate since we all started talking about the next-gen GeForce graphics cards about what exactly they would be called. Some people assumed that Nvidia would carry on with the boring numerical order of GPU series, with the 10-series Pascal cards being followed by a new 11-series. We can completely ignore that now, as this is cast-iron proof that Nvidia is indeed going to be producing the GTX 2080 along with this GTX 2080 Ti, and presumably a GTX 2070 and GTX 2060 too. There have been some people calling into question the benchmark’s legitimacy given that the user has never even had a single match in AotS. But that could just mark Nagato out as a pre-release tester, and anyway, has anyone actually played Ashes of the Singularity? I genuinely thought it was just a fake game attached to a benchmark AMD liked to wheel out occasionally… Some might also suggest that it’s odd for GTX 2080 Ti performance to have been leaked before the GTX 2080, given that Nvidia passim has the Ti version of a new generation of cards coming around six months after the initial launch. Those same people might even suggest that a GTX 2080 Ti delivering lower frame rates than a GTX 1080 Ti in the same benchmark would also render this leak unreliable, but I say fie and balderdash to that. Now we just need to figure out what that ‘special supply for GSS’ means. Gullible Silicon Sycophants, maybe? * it’s most definitely not true. ** not actually a guarantee.<doc-sep>There's surely not long to wait now. After two years with Nvidia's 10-series GPUs based on the Pascal architecture, we're finally due an upgrade. With several sources strongly suggesting a July launch date, Nvidia's next 'GPU King' may well be just around the corner, but what specs will it have? How powerful it be? In a market notorious for its often-accurate leaks, it's actually surprising how little we know, but there's enough information out there to at least give a broad overview of what we can expect. First of all though, it's worth commending Nvidia on just how tightly its next-gen GPU line-up has been locked down. Even the name of the new series and the upcoming flagship remains unconfirmed. A GTX 1180 to kick off an 11-series product line-up? Or a GTX 2080 with a brand shift to a 20-series? In a world where specs often arrive months before release, even the name of the new line-up is unknown right now. Certainly, there's been nothing like the Pascal production line leak that confirmed 2016's 10-series branding and gave us a pretty good idea of the Founders Edition ID weeks ahead of the official reveal. Only one publication - Wccftech - has released tentative specs and while there's a chance it's a genuine leak, there's enough ambiguity in there to suggest that it's a series of best guesses based on downsizing Nvidia's enormous Titan V processor - the only GPU currently available built using the next-gen architecture. In this sense, the 'leak' may well be inaccurate, but it may be 'ballpark' - after all, Nvidia has a proven formula whereby it starts with a big chip design aimed at its high-end datacentre customers, then shrinks it down, repurposing the same architecture for gamers, with reduced CUDA core counts and memory configuration, depending on the market sector. The only problem here is that Titan V is a product featuring a configuration with bespoke elements that'll never be released for gamers in its current form making guestimates on smaller, gaming-orientated versions hard to figure out. So what can we say about the next-gen architecture, for sure? As divorced from gaming markets as it may be, there is still much to learn from Titan V, built using a new architecture dubbed Volta. However, no less a source than Reuters revealed that the new gaming cards use a 'Turing' architecture. Again, nothing is confirmed, but it's entirely logical and reasonable to believe that the two are one and the same - or rather that Turing is essentially just the GPU component of Volta, shorn of the AI/deep-learning 'tensor cores' that are part and parcel of the Titan V and other products using the GV100 processor. These elements are designed to further Nvidia's massive commercial success in non-gaming markets, but would be essentially dead silicon on a GeForce graphics card. A video look at the facts we know about the next-gen Nvidia GPUs along with assessments of the various specs leaks. Something else we can take as read is that the next-gen Nvidia GPUs will be fabricated by Taiwanese chip giant TSMC on its 12nmFFN node - a production technology exclusive to Nvidia (indeed, the 'N' in FFN stands for Nvidia). As we understand it, this is actually more of a refinement of the 16nmFF process used in the current 10-series and while we don't expect to see much reduction in transistor sizes, it should at the very least offer power efficiency advantages. We can assume this is the case by looking at Titan V: it has 5120 CUDA cores vs the 3840 in the current Pascal Titan Xp - and even if we strip out GV100's non-gaming components, the die size would still be very large, significantly bigger than the Xp. So with that in mind, our best guess here is that next-gen Nvidia GPUs will be larger chips than their Pascal counterparts, the potential increase in power consumption offset to a certain extent by the advantages of the new 12nmFFN production process. We should also expect to see new memory technology in the new GPUs. Pascal pushed hard with GDDR5X, but Titan V utilises super-expensive HBM2 - and neither are a good fit for the hardware to come. Samsung and Micron have revealed that GDDR6 is in mass production now with a summer delivery date - just in time for next-gen Nvidia products. There's a huge increase in bandwidth with this new technology, meaning that a prospective GTX 1180/2080 can deliver 576GB/s over a mere 256-bit bus - the memory interface typically associated with Nvidia's x80 cards. That's higher than the 547GB/s in Titan XP, and positively dwarfs GTX 1080's 320GB/s. Several flavours of GDDR6 are coming online though, so lower numbers may be possible. We're hopeful that Nvidia retains the top-end speed though: 4K resolution gaming at 60 frames per second demands a lot of bandwidth. Clearly though, the actual facts we have about the hardware design of the next-gen Nvidia GPUs are limited. It's a new architecture built on a refined process, and the timings of GDDR6 coming online are unlikely to be coincidental - using this technology should offer a big cost saving for Nvidia compared to using HBM2. Beyond that, there are some hints from Titan V that may inform us of what to expect from the new GPUs - specifically, a 33 per cent increase in CUDA cores vs the existing Pascal big-chip Titan, signifying that perhaps most of the basic performance increase will come from more shaders, meaning more silicon area required to house them. Ray-tracing is going to be a big deal for Nvidia - here's Alex Battaglia's assessment of what was revealed at GDC this year. On top of that, benchmarks from GamersNexus (for our money, one of the best PC hardware sites out there) are worth checking out as they present compelling evidence that Nvidia has finally addressed its lacklustre support for a key DX12/Vulkan feature - asynchronous compute, the concept of occupying more of the GPU more of the time by giving dormant areas of the processor less time-sensitive tasks to carry out. A deeper focus on lower-level API support is long overdue, but if we're looking for more evidence of more new features in the Volta architecture, we can look back to GDC 2018, where Nvidia revealed a new focus on what it calls RTX - hardware-accelerated ray-tracing - a very forward-looking feature. Plenty of demos were revealed, the most notable being Epic's Star Wars render, running at 1080p at 24fps using four GV100 processors. However, a more realistic assessment of what the tech offers may be found in 4A Games' beautiful Metro Exodus demonstration, which uses ray-tracing for indirect lighting and ambient occlusion, with some excellent results. Our understanding is that 4A's more strategic use for the tech ran on one Titan V, suggesting that what we may think is far-flung future tech may be coming to gaming PCs a lot sooner than we might otherwise have thought. What remains is the question of how much support RTX will garner, what the performance hit is for using it and the extent to which more mainstream GPUs - like the inevitable GTX 1160/2060, for example - will be able to tap into the technology. So, as things stand, there's quite a lot about the next-gen Nvidia GPUs that we do know, but nothing concrete that answers the question of how powerful a new GTX 1180 would be, and more specifically, how it measures up against the established Pascal yardstick for performance leadership - Titan Xp. If you look at the single-source leaked spec or make your own guestimate by mapping Titan V's boost in CUDA cores to the x80 line, you would see the GTX 1180 inching ahead of Titan Xp - and potentially eclipsing it significantly in titles with extensive use of asynchronous compute. But before we move on, check out this roadmap of performance boosts between the x80 and x80 Ti GPUs from the Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal architectures. The initial impression is that Nvidia is gaining performance momentum with each generation (click play on the video to kick off the detailed analysis). Assassin's Creed Unity: Kepler vs Maxwell vs Pascal GTX 780 Ti GTX 980 GTX 980 Ti GTX 1080 GTX 1080 Ti This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings However, if the new architecture gains most of its performance boost from more CUDA cores, you're more likely to get a gen-on-gen bump more in line with the leap from Nvidia's Kepler to Maxwell, rather than the larger leap seen from Maxwell to Pascal. Look back to the release of initial Maxwell flagship GTX 980 and its lead over the outgoing GTX 780 Ti wasn't exactly a game-changer (though continued driver support and the extra gig of RAM certainly helped a great deal in the years to follow). You can see that from the testing benchmark embedded above where GTX 980 is only 16 per cent faster than GTX 780 Ti. Meanwhile, the leap from GTX 980 Ti to GTX 1080 is in the region of 32 per cent - a remarkable achievement. Only the resolution selected here limits the GTX 1080 Ti's 25 per cent uptick in performance vs GTX 1080. Assuming we are looking at a Maxwell-style boost, even with ballpark Titan Xp+ performance from a prospective GTX 1180, the lack of AMD competition means that it will be the most powerful single-chip GPU on the market - but what if Nvidia wants to push harder? The alternative is that the firm allocates more silicon than expected to its new designs, or that we see the 12nmFFN process pushed to higher frequencies. As we saw when we compared the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X processors, relatively small but significant bumps in shader count and clocks can add up to a large increase in performance. Overall then, a smattering of facts and a fair amount of speculation pretty much sums up what we know about the next generation of Nvidia hardware. The bottom line is that we don't even know for sure what the name of the product actually is, or indeed when it's going to come out. On the latter point though, July/August does look likely as up until a couple of days ago, the Hotchips symposium, slated for mid-August, revealed that Nvidia would be talking about its next mainstream GPU architecture on the first day of the conference - something that would be unlikely to happen if the product hadn't at least been announced by that point. That said, revisiting the site today, that conference appointment has been removed in favour of a non-descript 'TBD'. As I mentioned earlier, Nvidia has been pretty good at locking down those leaks - but it shouldn't be too long until those full specs are finally revealed.<doc-sep>
NVIDIA's next-generation graphics cards are a complete mystery even after several rumors and leaks. While there is no concrete timeframe given when the new cards would launch, a listing in Ashes of the Singularity benchmark database (via TUM APISAK) may have revealed the next-gen flagship graphics card for the GeForce family. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Benchmark Leaks Out - Tested in AOTS Benchmark, Is This Leak Credible? The benchmark was posted by the user "Nagato" who has no playtime in the game itself so I would say he's a tester rather than a gamer. The user tested the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Ti graphics card that is clearly mentioned in the hardware configuration. The chip was tested with a Core i7-7700K CPU which is good enough for gaming. The interesting part is that the card is listed as a special delivery for GSS. This is the first time we are looking at such an unusual naming attached to a GeForce card. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, The Ultimate Pascal Gaming Graphics Card, Might Make a Comeback, Freshly Produced GPU Batch Spotted As for the benchmarks, well they aren't that good but one look at the scores reveals why they are so low. If you look at the difference between the Low (1080p) and Crazy (1080p) preset on the DirectX 11 API, you'll note that the performance is nearly identical. Even with the Vulkan API on 1080p preset, the performance remains unchanged. This shows that the driver optimization is not there for this card right now. It must be a really early sample which was given a test run on current drivers by an internal tester. Now, what's up with that odd naming scheme and what's GSS? GSS is the abbreviation for GRUS Sparse Solver which is a novel sparse direct solver that runs CPU/GPU compute simultaneously. This could be related to that as NVIDIA is known to provide researchers with their unreleased products, prior to the market itself. Recently, NVIDIA gave out special CEO edition Titan V's to the top AI researchers. NVIDIA may have set a custom device id for this graphics card. The other theory is that GSS means something else entirely and we don't know of it yet. Also, we have been hearing the GeForce 11 series more often nowadays instead of the GeForce 20 series which was reported by a major OEM manufacturer like Lenovo on multiple occasions (here and here). The thing about this leak is that it contradicts most of what we have known so far. This could be some guy messing with the device id of an existing graphics card and that would also explain the unusual naming scheme. But then again, it doesn't explain the weird benchmarks that this card produces as the GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti don't produce results similar to this at all. NVIDIA's high-end PCB for next-generation graphics cards supporting a 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM along a 384-bit interface was leaked out a while ago. It was nowhere a PCB designed for a G**04 solution but rather a high-end GPU design. We have previously seen NVIDIA graphics cards such as the Titan V, show up in full retail-ready design, 6 months prior to its launch. There is a lot that this benchmark leak could mean. It could just be a fake or it could be the real thing but for that, we have to wait and see. Once again, if the 2080 Ti exists like the one in the benchmark, it won't necessarily mean a launch alongside the upcoming parts, as Ti variants usually get their own launches months after the non-Ti parts. So yeah, just as an advice, treat this leak as a rumor.