According to the latest Nvidia Ampere rumor, your RTX 2080 Super won't get much older, but at least the prohibitive performance cost of ray tracing may be a thing of the past.

Yes, rumors of next-generation GPUs have been spreading fast following the Green Team's announcement at the GTC keynote on May 14. First, Jen Sun, the official presenter, appeared on the virtual stage in her trademark leather jacket, urging people to "Get Amped" for Nvidia's online keynote.

Subtle, isn't it? Ampere's codename is almost confirmed, and Nvidia's first commercial Ampere machine appears to be in the works; the DGX A100 trademark (discovered by a small town of tweeting machines) was filed at the end of March, and the next generation Ampere-based pro card, possibly the Tesla A100 with details of a machine that uses.

At the heart of the card is a GA100 GPU, which will be the first Ampere-based graphics silicon to be released and is expected to be the basis for a new generation of computer-centric professional workstations and GPU server blades.

Nvidia DGX machines have existed since the days of the Pascal architecture, but multiple versions of the Volta-based machines have been available with up to 16 V100 GPUs, providing large amounts of GPU-backed computing power. And you can get that Volta GPU power for just £390,857.66, or £18,760.63 per month. Eek.

Don't expect any GeForce announcements, as this month's GTC event is likely to be primarily about high-performance professional computing. Talk of RTX 20 series cards being wiped from the channel in anticipation of the imminent release of the next generation of Nvidia graphics cards is a leap too far if they expect it anytime soon.

In short, the DGX A100 is the first official mention of an Ampere-based rig, but that is as far as reliable information goes...

What appears to be a new leak, published on a YouTube channel and no doubt from an Nvidia insider source, claims to have many details about the new Ampere-based GeForce cards. Those details, to be honest, are pretty light, a bit woolly, and little more than a few marketing bullet points. [The important thing to note, however, is that Nvidia Ampere will be both a gaming and professional architecture, marking a change from the Volta/Turing era and AMD's own dichotomy between gaming and professional GPU technology. In terms of performance, it will also be more than a die-silinked version of the RTX 20 series Turing.

With ray tracing capabilities that are said to be four times that of Turing, Ampere's GeForce cards are expected to largely mitigate the exorbitant performance hit that turning on ray tracing represents for the current generation of GPUs. And it is reportedly going to show how inferior Turing is compared to newer cards, essentially making it look like a ray tracing test platform, making Ampere the proverbial "real thing."

The speculation is that something like the RTX 3060 may be able to trace rays at a similar level to the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti. That said, it may be a stretch to say that an RTX 3060 could possibly be able to trace rays at the same level as a $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti. Ampere's rasterization performance is something that has not even been rumored yet, and it is not clear that the overall next-generation Nvidia graphics card It will play a major role in configuring the overall gaming performance of the next generation of Nvidia graphics cards.

Another intriguing tidbit is the claim that GTX is dead, with RTX prefixes above and below the GeForce stack, with Tensor and RT cores being dropped to even the lowest spec Ampere GPUs.

The rumor mill is still grinding away, and this latest video only adds a little more grist to the mill.